Posts by doublelayer

Japanese cyber security minister 'doesn't know what a USB stick is'

They should know some things

A manager should have a working knowledge of the big components, not every detail. I wouldn't expect a minister of transport to know the different kinds of tarmac, but I would expect them to know that airplanes are machines that go into the air and land in another place, conveying their passengers and/or cargo to that destination, that pilots are the people who fly them, and that they are supposed to land only at airports. In fact, I expect anyone to know that. Ministers for transport should also know where they fly (I.E. where the airports are and how high the planes are when flying at cruising altitude), how they fly (in the sense of what is needed in terms of fuel, people, coordination, and equipment), and what restrictions there are on who, when, where, how, and why they fly. I wouldn't expect a minister for transport to be able to fly a plane, but if they asked "What is air traffic control", I would say that they are unqualified.

A cybersecurity manager should know what security is, and what poses risks to it. They should know what the internet is, and at least something about how it works and why this creates security risks. Otherwise, how could the manager decide whether to trust me when I say "I have a product that your office should purchase which will provide a completely hardened layer preventing people from breaking into connections over the gopher protocol." That's a thing a manager decides, and they need to know to throw the person making that statement out immediately as a scam. If you don't know that, or at the very least how to find that out quickly, you are unqualified.

Creepy or super creepy? That is the question Mozilla's throwing at IoT Christmas pressies

Re: Now if Mozilla would look at itself

That's all true, but mozilla still has the browser that is less privacy-invading than the main competitors. Of the browsers that real users (read not us) install, firefox is the one I'm most comfortable with. In addition, firefox being open means that most of the browsers that are better are forks or redistributions of it.

Google swallows up DeepMind Health and abolishes 'independent board'

Re: Lets hope

Citation: just look at any time when they collected data without being above board on informing the people whose data was collected. Which is pretty much every time they collected something. Just because you may be fine with google having the information you know they have doesn't mean that others are. If google collected information on people and they didn't want it to happen, that is sufficient evidence for those people to be worried about google getting access to health data.

Re: Lets hope

I don't think the disapproval is specifically about machine learning being used on health data; that's been done on anonymized data for years by academic and industry researchers, and is likely to continue. I believe the complaint is about google, which has not before proven itself knowledgable about health, as this isn't much related to their standard business model, but has proven itself to not be great at keeping any data private, even data that citizens and governments believe should be more private than usual.

Another 3D printer? Oh, stop it, you're killing us. Perhaps literally: Fears over ultrafine dust

Re: "Lots of things are dangerous if you use them incorrectly."

Everything is dangerous when used incorrectly enough. The question is whether these devices are safe when used correctly. Many people put them in enclosed spaces, because the closet is the best place for a thing that takes up space and you don't really have to interact with very much. So if it is dangerous for it to be in there, we should probably know and deal with it.

Microsoft lobs Windows 10, Server Oct 2018 update at world (minus file-nuking 'feature') after actually doing some testing

Re: hobson's choice

Apple does spy, somewhat, but nothing like what other companies do. They don't collect as much information, are better at allowing data to stay on the device rather than getting sent to them, and don't make a large part of their business from data exploitation. So yes, I'm saying that.

Re: Build number?

There are three version numbers. The 10.[randomdecimal] one that doesn't matter, the build number, and the version number. The version number is 1809, even though that's the wrong number (see my post above for why it's wrong if you care which you probably shouldn't). You have the build number, which at least goes in order. So when that number goes up, the build is newer. Build 17134 seems to be the final version of windows 10 version 1803. So in short, it's crazy.

Re: A good update?

It's also just the wrong number. These 4-digit numbers used to be two digits from the year, and then the two digit month, which brought us such logical numbers as 1407 (July 2014), 1511 (November 2015), etc. Then they release a version titled the April 2018 update, which actually came out in May, and number it 1803. Hey, 03 means March, guys. From original release date and name, this should be build 1810, and from new release date, it should be 1811. Definitely not 1809.

Just a little heads up: Google is still trying to convince everyone that web apps don't suck

Re: insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results

Agreed on the misattribution point. I would much prefer it if this didn't happen.

For most things, there is enough stability that doing them multiple times results in similar effects. With a broad definition of the action and the result, they do the same thing. See rolling a die (expect a number 1-6 or the die rolling away and under some piece of furniture) or slamming your hand in a door (expect pain and possible bleeding) for examples. I therefore find the definition useful for use with those people (E.G. my parents) who have, and most likely will again, sat in front of an interface, not knowing what to click to get their desired result, and will click the same button that definitely did not do it last time, expecting that it will work this time.

Re: Security...

I'm going to have to disagree with you there. I'll grant that installing a binary that is untrusted is a security nightmare, because it has a great deal of access to the disk. The other side of that coin is that granting a web app access to the disk also lets them have similar levels of access. It may be sandboxed, but there are infinitely many security problems allowing things to exit their sandbox or run stuff inside their sandbox that affect things outside it, E.G. putting some malware in there and using the scheduler to run it. So don't allow anything untrustworthy to have access to your disk.

On this front, binaries have an advantage in that they can quite easily be loaded into virtual machines, taken apart, run through malware scanners, blocked by security policies, run inside custom sandbox products, and the like. Most of these things can't be done easily or at all with a web app. You can run it in a VM, but the code still knows where you are because it can require a network connection to start. Most other things in the list are completely impossible. What's more, a binary doesn't change itself, or if it does, you can find out. A web app runs the latest code that was pushed to you. That new code could be an update from the authors, the result of someone getting into the server, a result of someone changing the source for a nodejs component, or someone deciding the application doesn't need to exist anymore. This leaves a large landscape for injection of malware, and I don't want it.

In addition, there eventually comes a time where you need programs with disk access. When dealing with data, sometimes you want more than one program to be able to modify it. You use program 1 for some functionality, save the file, and use program 2 to do something different. Web apps are going to make that a disaster. For example, I give you the app mentioned in the article that compresses images. We already have a bunch of tools that compress images, and they can be quite fast. Does the web interface add anything to this process, even assuming it does the job as well as something using the GPU for the math? Somehow, I doubt it. A graphical program with access to the disk can make it really easy to do batch compressions. A command line program can allow scripting of the compression process. A web app can... it can compress images. What is the benefit?

Re: But surely anything better than an "app" for everything ?

They don't need their own apps, and that is quite disorganized. However, would I rather that they have multiple apps or multiple web apps pushed onto my device? I'll choose real apps in this situation. The reason for this is that these apps probably all provide GPS location capabilities to find a car for me, and push notifications to alert me when that car has arrived. A standard app can also offer other features that a web app cannot. So my options are having apps for this additional functionality or changing what a web app can do so it can have the functionality we already have.

Another issue that makes me choose native apps in this situation is accounts and privacy. If I'm doing this all with websites, I probably have to log in very often or let cookies and other data stay there forever. Apps don't need that, because they can store account details locally. Effectively, that's a cookie, but they are restricted to their own data so can't read other cookies that other apps have stored. I can also kill their app without affecting other things on the system in a way that is not as easy to do to a website.

I prefer web to apps in many scenarios. Whenever the system typically involves sending data to a remote location so they can do something with it, that's a case for web. An app is rarely needed for this. But when the app needs to interact a lot with me, both sending me information and conveying my responses to a remote system, I go for the stable and somewhat trustworthy native code rather than the everything-in-javascript dream of the portable web app.

Between you, me and that dodgy-looking USB: A little bit of paranoia never hurt anyone

Re: paranoia

If you allow this to go as far as it can, you end up not able to use anything. Every time you buy something with a USB connector on it, it might have been compromised. Every time you are given something, that might be compromised too. The computer you bought might have malware preinstalled. The parts you were going to use to build yourself a computer because you can't trust the manufacturers might have malware on them.

In the case of the conference, I think it's fair to assume that the drive is probably safe. Don't just assume that it is--test it first--but it is not the high-risk situation like when drives are found unattended. If you always use "what is possible" as your question for trust, you will end up at a dead end. Instead, ask "what is feasible" and "what is likely", and take whatever precautions are available for those infeasible and unlikely things that nonetheless are possible.

Re: A paranoid mount option ?

We could make that run on a raspberry pi rather easily. If we don't let the standard interface run, it doesn't have any automatic handling for USB disks. Then we block acceptance of other USB devices at the device level. Our display would have to be mounted on the GPIO system, but a cursory check of the pi hat manufacturers shows several options that can do display, touch input, and power from the GPIO. We'd first check what interface(s) the USB device says it provides, and assuming it's only storage, we can grab details about the filesystem and the files on it. We should probably do a quick scan for suspicious stuff, especially windows executables and shell/batch/powershell scripts. This wouldn't help against a USB device that intends on physically destroying a machine, but I don't know whether someone is really likely to start handing those out, and at least only our USB tester would be vaporized. This isn't completely foolproof (for example, you could have an innocent-appearing storage disk that only mounts the malicious stuff after ten minutes) but it'd be pretty good against the typical threats. Should we build it?

Huawei Mate 20 Pro: If you can stomach the nagware and price, it may be Droid of the Year

Re: Not expandable memroy

They should stop making up new card types. Is this card any better than a micro SD card? Even if it is slightly smaller, the lack of any available rather nullifies that benefit. In addition, the phone has enough space for a micro SD card; it's not that big a difference in size. We already tried the lots of different incompatible portable storage type system. We didn't like it.

Re: Can anyone tell me the advantage of face/print unlock?

I'd imagine that physically picking up someone's hand to get the fingerprint would wake them up. If face unlock works when their eyes are closed, however, that would probably be easy to do without waking them up. When security is included, a PIN is clearly the most secure option.

'Frontline workers' of the world, unite! And grab yourselves a Surface Go White Van Man edition

Re: Not very rugged

If they start using them, I'm sure there will be an available rugged case. After all, iPads aren't very resistant, either, but they get used a lot. It is still a lot more cash for the performance available, but that probably won't stop people buying them.

Google's secret to a healthy phone? Remote-controlling your apps

Re: Play Protect

If I was simply using unwanted apps as an indicator of maliciousness, I would have a long list indeed with the phone I mentioned. I work in security, though not on android. The apps I mentioned were constantly phoning home to various servers that did not seem very happy about telling me what they did. The to do list app scanned as known malware. The facebook app did facebook things as far as I could tell, but did not seem to come from facebook and had a weird version number that I couldn't match with versions of facebook posted to google play. Convinced now?

Re: Play Protect

I recently saw a similarly low-cost phone riddled with malware straight from the factory. Fortunately, it had been purchased by a member of my family for their young child, who could not figure out why it kept making a sound every five minutes though notifications were turned off and that sound wasn't even the sound for notifications. I couldn't figure that out either, but found enough malware that I saw it as my duty to confiscate the device, find a malware-free replacement in a closet, and remove the original from our collective misery.

For this device, the entry points of choice were a to do list app that had been installed in nonremovable fashion and of course the facebook app though probably only half of the malware in that was specifically facebook's fault. That thing was bashed enough times with a hammer before sent to recyclers. Die, unscrupulous android devices, die.

How one programmer's efforts to stop checking in buggy code changed the DevOps world

Re: Jenkins?

Having never used it, I find your explanation logical. This sounds like it would be a useful tool for parallel testing. However, I would contest your point that "the alternative to not checking in code with bugs is writing perfect code every time". I would argue that the best alternative to checking in code with bugs is to test it on all available test cases and possibly new ones *before* it is checked in. This won't be perfect, but it will be much less of a hassle for other members of the team. I doubt the developer is really bad at writing and testing code, but I don't think his style of self-deprecation did him any favors there.

My hoard of obsolete hardware might be useful… one day

Re: Old Stuff

Perhaps what is worse than having a bunch of obsolete tech is finding obsolete tech that you decide you want. I was recently working at a different location, and helped a colleague there search through some cabinets in the basement, where I found a bunch of really ancient things, one of which was a ... well sort of a laptop from the DOS days, although we don't know exactly which DOS days. This one being a rather rare machine from a manufacturer in New Zealand. I found myself wanting to take this back with me and try to get it running. Then, I remembered a few problems with that:

1. I didn't know how the thing worked.

2. The thing didn't have a power cable, so I'd have to make one based on the specs written on the machine.

3. The machine had two floppy drives, at least one of which had important software. There was already a disk in both drives, but they were not labeled. Next to that was a binder containing at least a hundred more disks. There was really no telling which one had the software on it.

4. It probably weighed ten kilos or so, and I had to fly back.

5. Nobody had given me permission to discard this for them, although to judge from the other contents of the cabinet, they were not going to want any of it.

It's probably still there. If I get sent there again, I might just take it this time.

Re: A deadline ?

Well, I may not be able to beat you for age of old junk, but does anyone need a fully functional desktop system and accessories for publishing from, say, 2001 or so? I've got this tower with a wonderful pentium in there, a whole 256 MB of memory, and a 30 GB hard drive. It has USB 1 ports, though one is broken, and of course a slow CD reader that is the major way of getting data into it. Plus a scanner that uses a firewire 400 connection and weighs about sixty kilos. There's a printer, too, some inkjet thing that you probably can't actually get cartridges for, but it's still there. I plead not guilty; this is at my parents' house, and somehow I always get sidetracked though I've wanted to get rid of the thing for at least five years now.

In news that will shock absolutely no one, America's cellphone networks throttle vids, strangle rival Skype

Re: If only

How would that work with devices that are frequently behind firewalls or NATs, or changing from one cell tower to another. Writing a client that can send a video signal pier to pier and receive it is not that complicated. Making a good one might take some effort, but the technical aspects are easy enough. However, as with every other pier to pier thing, you end up dealing more with networking than many will accept. Even things that are mostly pier to pier often rely on a central register of who is involved and how you can find them, and sometimes that register will also have the functionality to assist with connections because there isn't a direct open channel to that device. If you can overcome these problems, you'll have fixed quite a bit.

Windows 10 Pro goes Home as Microsoft fires up downgrade server

Re: Only affects insider program - Not correct

No, it affects anybody who installed an update* after the servers got broken, whenever that was. Insiders saw it first because they install updates a lot, but it will affect a lot of people before someone fixes it.

*installed an update, or had an update flung at you, or maybe there's something else that contacts the registration servers though the article doesn't say there is

Re: el kabong

Previous post asks:

"b) WHY was it turned into a 'Home' system because THEY broke something?"

That is just how their system broke. There isn't a good explanation possible, and I'm sure when they get around to having an explanation it won't be good.

"c) No PREVIOUS version of windows (to the best of my knowledge) needed any kind of continuous on-line RE-ACTIVATION process to "stay valid" d) what if you leave your computer OFF for MORE THAN A MONTH? Or, how about OFFLINE for MORE THAN A MONTH? e) what if it's a VM that you only run when you HAVE to? [I should test this after I back it up]"

As far as I know, having run an airgapped windows machine for a while (yes, windows 10, don't ask why), windows doesn't need to contact the servers for it to stay valid. It will continue to work. It is just that when updating, it does contact the servers and then assumes that anything they say is correct. So VMs or computers not used in some time should be fine. Computers that updated something in the past week probably aren't.

Re: Expecting test versions to not have problems is amateurish.

As the article states, this is a problem with production license servers and affects non-insider, NON-BETA, production users. Insiders noticed it first because they update a lot so they talk to license servers a lot. It can and has affected other users too, and is most definitely a problem.

Re: Just go Linux

For the record:

1. This applies to non-insiders. It is not beta code that broke, but instead Microsoft's production servers.

2. There are things that you can do in windows pro that you cannot do in windows home. People doing those things selected pro for that reason. If they are affected by this bug, it is more than a minor annoyance or some grumpy license notification.

Premiere Pro bug ate my videos! Bloke sues Adobe after greedy 'clean cache' wipes files

Re: user error

It's said that the cache was located inside, but not in the same directory, as other videos. For example, the cache at /*/videos/cache, but the video projects themselves at /*/videos. If that's true, this would be entirely adobe's fault. However, if this is not the case, I would expect a product made for people who aren't necessarily technical to look in that folder and say "Hey, this cache folder isn't empty. This is where we put temporary work files; think of it as our scratchpad. Files in here are ones you don't deal directly with, but we might change or delete them. Are you really, absolutely, 100% sure that this is where cache files should go?". Plenty of terminal tools written for people who are supposed to know not only how they work but also how to rewrite them in some cases still have a "replace files?" prompt. That said, if this event actually involved the cache directory being set to the videos directory and not a subdirectory of it, I have less sympathy for the user.

Apple replaces boot-loop watchOS edition with unconnected complications edition

Re: 176 Mb

Most of that will be graphics for various parts, as the updates are full system images. So significantly less than two million lines of code. Still, I agree with you on the bloated part.

Web domain owners paid EasyDNS to cloak their contact info from sight. It was blabbed via public Whois anyway

Re: GDPR users were less exposed

I have a website, and I've opted out of having the details in whois. I don't need automated systems collecting my mail address and phone number; if someone really wants to know who owns the site or to contact me, they can fire up their browsers and read the pages or use the contact form. Given that I don't maintain any infrastructure that someone might need to ask me to fix (the original purpose of whois), what benefit does it have for my site?

In addition, I've never found whois particularly useful in other cases. For example, I had a domain name that I wanted, but someone else had. However, they were not using it for anything. In the whois details, I found that it had been registered twenty years earlier and that the owners were not a domain squatter, so maybe I could convince them to let me have it. But the contact details were the generic ones for the company that owned it. If I contacted them, I'd have ended up talking to people who probably don't know they have the domain name, let alone who I could talk to to ask for it. So what utility does it have for other domain names?

Finally, it has no use in security, because nobody verifies the data that's entered. If I was running a scam, I could put plausible data in there with no problem because the registrar is not going to verify it, which means that I can't use whois lookups to verify if something is trustworthy or not.

Dot-com web addresses prices to swell, thanks to sweetheart deal between Uncle Sam, Verisign

Probably won't matter much

I get my domains through gandi.net because they have treated me fairly and make it clear what they do and how much I pay for it. There, a .com costs $15.50/year, which seems fair to me, especially as I usually can't find out how much something costs from other registrars. So we'll see if they increase their prices when verisign does. In general, I don't think domain prices in this area cause much of a problem. It's still relatively cheap for people earning an income. For students or those needing a temporary domain, the landscape is not as easy, but they probably wouldn't be buying a .com anyway. Of course, if prices increased a lot, which I'm sure verisign would be more than happy to do, it could stop being fair to smallish companies. Even now, unless you're living in a country whose CCTLD is actually used there, .com is the most accepted for companies.

Mourning Apple's war against sockets? The 2018 Mac mini should be your first port of call

Re: Features that don't matter.

"Not as small means that it is more maintainable, more flexible, and less likely to cook itself. Smallness is a pretty optional feature in 99% of real consumer use cases. It's not really an advantage."

I beg to differ. Sure, a larger desktop does have benefits in maintenance and heat. This I'll grant. But the small form factor is more flexible, because you can put it in places you can't put the large thing, as well as every place you could put the large thing. As for it being necessary, people live in small places. People live in tiny flats, university housing, etc. You don't always have tons of space to put something. If power is so important, you'll probably use some of that limited space for a full-sized desktop. Still, it can be useful to have the option of a small desktop that leaves more room for the other possessions you may have. A small computer like a mini/NUC/raspberry pi is also much easier to use headless. If you want a system for a room, something that small can be slotted nearly anywhere, including just hanging on the wall if there is no convenient place otherwise. A desktop doesn't have that.

"If you want a powerful server that you can stick in your rucksack or airline carry-on bag, there's not much to match this currently."

It really depends on your use case, but I think there is. For one thing, you have to figure out why you need a powerful server on the go. If it is to deploy it somewhere else, then you still end up in the small computer comparison. I'll grant you that sometimes you need six cores and 64GB memory on a server that you carry with you, but most of the time, probably not. The ease in modifying a NUC makes it a really good candidate for to-be-deployed server in a small box.

In most cases, however, the computer you carry in a rucksack to provide you with a lot of power will be a laptop. You can get them with more processing and memory, although those are usually somewhat heavy. I assume that would be a more useful portable machine than a mac mini for most use cases. You can compute on it when you're on the go, rather than having to have mains power, a monitor, and input devices to run it.

The mac mini also has lost some of its appeal when compared to other options in the small computers lineup. It is far too expensive now to be a logical choice for a media machine, especially as a raspberry pi can do it well. For server purposes, you would probably want a device running Linux on more expandable hardware, rather than using the OSX server app that has been losing functionality.

As a mac desktop, it's not bad. It has the ports that we normal people want, and it is reasonably powerful. Still, it has lost some of the niches a mac mini used to fill.

We (may) now know the real reason for that IBM takeover. A distraction for Red Hat to axe KDE

Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

At the university I went to, our CS department did everything they could on REL. Servers all ran it, and all machines in the labs were REL desktops. They probably want everything on the same level. Could they have had the workstations run fedora/ubuntu? Definitely, just as they could have put those on the servers and still been fine. Still, REL on the workstations probably helped in administering them.

£220k fines for dodgy dialling duo who didn't do due dil on data

Re: Mass Dialers -- A.K.A Robo-callers

While there are hardware ones, and you could probably ban them, it would be very difficult to tell the difference between a call center using a software autodialer and a call center doing normal jobs. The call center people just say "I finish a call, and my headset rings again. It's not my fault that we're busy", while the admin people say "We just manage the employees and make sure they answer all the incoming calls we have, and also we have to call some of our clients back because they've agreed to it." By the time anyone investigates, the IP phone system has been reprogrammed, so nobody knows for sure what exactly they were doing.

Supreme Court raises eyebrows at Google's cozy $8.5m legal deal

Original judge

After hearing the arguments from plaintiffs' and defendants' council, the court is forced to accept that it isn't feasible to make payments to all 129 million people in the amount of four cents. Therefore, we have decided that obviously an abuse by a company is worth far more than four cents to the victims, so we're just going to get our calculator out here. Let's say that they all deserve like a hundred dollars at least? Oh sorry, that wouldn't be viable. So two dollars it is.

In order to redress objections mutually agreed to by council of both plaintiff and defendant, The new fine for the defendant will be set to a total of $258 million, which is to be distributed to the class action plaintiffs. Oh, and the defendant has to pay separately for any arrangements. Chop chop.

Apple's launch confirms one thing: It's determined to kill off the laptop for iPads

Re: I never got laptops...

I'll extend that a bit.

If I want portability, I'll use a smartphone (or old phone if all I want is communication, but probably a smartphone).

If I want raw power, I'll use a desktop.

If I want a large amount of computing power but available in many places, I'll use a laptop. I can bring it with me in a backpack, and can use it on the go from its battery.

I don't need a tablet because it is as big as a laptop (the slight difference in weight doesn't make much difference) but can't do as much. I don't need something as powerful as the portable thing but as portable as the thing I need a backpack to carry.

Re: Ports

They really should have said that apple removed the standard USB A ports, which they did and people actually use a lot. I have a mac from a few years ago with two traditional thunderbolt ports. I have never connected anything to them. The only thing I could possibly have used is some displays that have that connection.

Chuck this on expenses: £2k iPad paints Apple as the premium fondleslab specialist – as planned

Re: 2000 quid?

"It's a similar price to it's nearest competitor the Wacom MobileStudio Pro 13."

Sure. But firstly, I'd much rather have the studio, because it runs a normal OS and has some expandability with normal ports and second, that is also overkill/nearly useless for most use cases. You can beat both of these machines in most areas. Compute power? You can get a lot more for the price with a desktop, a laptop, even some tablets with full OS's on them. Battery life? Use a machine with a similar processor but a less power-hungry screen or one you can control better. Functionality? Use something else; check. When comparing this to a laptop, virtually any modern laptop, it loses. People don't typically want to approach their computing devices and draw on the screen. Some designers and artists do, but it's been tried a lot for the rest of the computer user population, and we said no. So what feature does this iPad have that warrants it costing twice as much as a comparable laptop, with touchscreen, with the capability to run a full OS and maybe be somewhat repairable. You could even get a not bad apple laptop for half the price of this one. They're putting the price far too high.

Shift-work: Keyboards heaped in a field push North Yorks council's fly-tipping buttons

Why

How difficult is it to recycle keyboards? It would seem that these would be relatively easy to drop off at a recycling center. If you really want to violate the law, they'd also be really easy to drop illegally in a convenient trash bin. These aren't those massive printer/scanner monstrosities that probably require fork lifts just to get to the recycling center; at least that would make sense as a thing left in a field.

I have a lead. Look for the laziest lawbreakers available. It's probably them.

Apple tipped to revive forgotten Macbook Air and Mac mini – report

Re: I shall call it Mini-Me

I seriously doubt that they'll suddenly decide that this one should allow hardware modifications. In general, depending on use case, the base config would probably work for a lot of people. For technical users like us, four gigs of memory is limiting, but if you're using it headless or as a basic computing device for a nontechnical family, it isn't that bad. You could run into storage limits with the 128GB SSD, but it fills up a lot more slowly than windows does, so I'd call it doable.

For me, the Mac Mini has been out-of-date long enough to weaken its position in the small box market. For a while, the Mac Mini was really the only usable computer at that size. Anything else at that size was ridiculously underpowered and/or expensive. Even after that, the system compared well against the usable, sort of, alternatives. I remember helping a friend decide on a small machine to use as a media system in early 2015. We considered various options, including the raspberry pi (then version 2) and the intel compute stick, but they just couldn't compare to the mac mini. The raspberry pi didn't have built-in networking and required a lot of cabling to set up the required storage. The compute stick had an atom processor which wouldn't be very fast, and was said to overheat a lot. The mac mini allowed all of that to be stored in one convenient unit, with enough processing to do most tasks and storage sufficient for a small media collection.

The small computers have caught up, and probably overtaken. Now that the raspberry pi has WiFi, which frees up a USB port, and a much faster processor, it can do most if not all tasks a headless mac mini would do. It still needs external storage if used as a media machine, but that's only one thing to connect. I doubt that the compute stick is very good yet, but there are small machines with intel processors as well. These are smaller than the mac is, they offer more options for modification later on, and they give you a lot more performance for the price.

Re: nice, but...

If you don't like the Mac system, don't buy one. But for all its faults, which I don't deny, it is not a walled garden. When you set one up, you have root access already with most terminal tools. Installing development tools is easy, and installing other packages can be done without much difficulty. They have an appstore, but you can sideload and most applications do. It isn't perfect, but there is little they prevent you from doing to the software. As for the hardware, they are indeed difficult to repair. I might recommend getting an older one, which usually had discrete memory slots at least.

I wouldn't be surprised if apple does turn their macs into a walled garden later on, but they haven't done that yet and if they do, I can hold any mac I have on the version before that, which will continue to function until I find a new thing to replace it with.

Apple breathes new life into MacBook Air with overhauled 2018 model

Re: 1440×900

I believe the resolution is 2560x1600 (4096000 pixels in total). Apple's made that display at this size for a while, so it makes the most sense.

Techie was bigged up by boss… only to cause mass Microsoft Exchange outage

Re: Why would you have a maintenance window at 6:30am?

I'd also rather the job where I can do some maintenance from home late at night. However, that option is dangerous. If something breaks that requires me to be on site, then I probably have to go there. At night, when access isn't always figured out, and transport systems might not run as often if at all. Worse, let's say that I say "Sure, I'll work at night for a bit running standard maintenance and also be there in the day. It still adds up to the same amount." Now, they have an expectation that I'll be there during the day. If the maintenance is usually thirty minutes or so, that's fine. When it becomes several hours for a major update or something similar, requiring you to stay up most of the night to work on it, you have less leeway to say that you won't be in. You have a perfectly good excuse, but that often doesn't convince the people who pay you.

Re: Why would you have a maintenance window at 6:30am?

Good logic. My guess is that they wanted the sysadmin there during the work day, but didn't want to hire another one. They can't reasonably ask the person to be there at night and during the day, so they just schedule it for early in the day with the assumption that "We gave you time to run the maintenance, when we wouldn't complain. So if it isn't working at 7:00 when that ends, we feel we have all the excuse we need to yell at you".

The Chinese are here: Xiaomi to bring phones to the UK next month

Re: I love this

I've seen some similar things. I don't think this article is really doing that, other than to point out that Chinese manufacturers haven't been very mainstream until Huawei became so about a year ago. Before then, none of them were all that well-known, although you could buy phones from them.

As for the trustworthiness of the tech, I'm willing to trust most of it. However, there are a few parts that are a little weird. I recently got a Xiaomi fitness tracker to use as an alarm clock (I like vibration alarms). The companion app wanted me to sign a strange license agreement containing such normal phrases as "This product may not be used to damage the reunification of the motherland." and "People with intentions of antisocial or antigovernment actions may not use this product." I found those a little off-putting. Fortunately, I found an open-source companion app instead, so I used that. Still, when faced by things like this that remind you of the system watching Chinese citizens, I believe one could be forgiven for asking whether there's anything creepy in the code that we can't see. I don't really think there is in most if not all cases, but the question isn't irrational.

Should a robo-car run over a kid or a grandad? Healthy or ill person? Let's get millions of folks to decide for AI...

Re: Choosing to kill someone is murder, shirly?

Self defense is one thing. Choosing an alternate victim is another. If there is a person planning to shoot me, and I have a gun, I can shoot them in self defense. If the person is going to shoot me, and I grab another person and shove them in front of me, that's murder on my part. In the case of a crashing car, if given the choice of "die or that person dies", selecting the latter could easily be considered murder, because the victim you chose was not at fault. Hence the person on the sidewalk.

Re: Important 'cause...

Some studies of this effect attribute it to the brain not discarding memories from a point of intense emotion, especially fear. They have done some tests by having people fall off buildings (they were OK with it) and the brain does not appear to overclock. I don't know if anyone's found something different, but that's what I read a while ago.

I'm glad you did not fall into the harbor. That sounds like a terrible experience.

Microsoft promises a fix for Windows 10 zip file woes. In November

Little victories

I don't use windows a lot, but I have an application that requires it to run, which I'm running on an old laptop running windows 10 (it only has to run this one application and a tiny script that sends the data somewhere else, so it needs little processing). I was working next to it yesterday and had inadvertently awoken it. About two minutes later, a message came on the screen. It read "We can't install some updates. Click here for more information". That message made me happy for several minutes.

Memo to Microsoft: Windows 10 is broken, and the fixes can't wait

Re: Am I missing something here?

Windows CE wasn't great, perhaps, but it was stable and did run for mobile PDA-type things. You could use the applications on them, and you could load others. It provided a common platform for applications that would run regardless of device peculiarities, and with some support for modern (of the time) hardware. You could also get some interaction between the mobile device and computer that actually worked, sort of. What other mobile OS had that at the time? As I recall, most of them worked but only with their own programs, or weren't compatible with much else. I think it could have provided Microsoft with a very good entrance into mobile computing, although we'll never know because they threw it away with Windows Phone 7. Still, there are a lot of embedded devices that still run it (I don't know why).

As for normal windows, I've never really loved it, but most versions were acceptable until windows 8. That's when they didn't just alter the interface, but instead crumpled it up and started over. I'd have to give windows 10 a slight edge over windows 8 in the interface department, but that's like saying that it's closer to the top of Mt. Everest because it's standing on a phone book. Meanwhile, everything else still managed to get worse with the release of windows 10.

Re: "Quality" is a structural attribute, not a bolt-on

Me: "changes are much more likely to be written, tested, and put into operation quickly if the codebase is modern."

Response: "Define modern. This sounds very much like the usual rant about having to periodically update legacy S/W i.e. the stuff that's earning the business's income."

Modern refers to the original comment about businesses continuing to run code written in the 1980s because, as the comment claimed, that software was just written really well then so they have no problems. Not only do I not believe the software was just wonderful then, as it probably had plenty of bugs that had to be removed from it back then, but it is difficult to change. Code written in the 1980s will still run, but only on legacy hardware or operating systems which imposes another cost on the business. If you need to update how the software works, your options are:

1. The codebase was written in the 1980s in a 1980s language. In order to modify it, you need people familiar with that language. This is not a ton of people. Many of the people who are familiar with it, looking for a job, and willing to work for you have been writing in different things. I know, for example, a person who wrote assembly for various Cray supercomputers. I don't think he would know how to do that now, though he'd be faster to relearn it than would I.

2. The code is written in a modern language. This may be painful to port from the original code, but it is now easier for it to be modified. You still have to hire good programmers, and you shouldn't do it as cheaply as possible because you'll end up with terrible bugs. However, when you need something updated, it's much easier to find a competent person if the language is more modern. If I found a bug that needed to be fixed quickly, I'd much rather the code be written in C, Python, Java, or most other modern languages than Cobol, because I know I can find someone to write in those languages. I don't know how to find a competent Cobol person, let alone assembly for $random_processor_from_three_decades_ago.

Therefore, I would disagree with the assertion that companies should continue running old code because people just don't write how they used to. I think that's a dangerous course of action most of the time, and although many modern companies forget important testing practices and the like, there are others that still produce reliable code.