>> This is what it feels like, if done properly.

"OH CHRIST IT'S BURNING! IT'S BURNING! MAKE IT STOP! I NEED YOGHURT NOW, ANY FLAVOUR, NOW! I DON'T CARE HOW MUCH FAT!"

(at least that's how leg-crossing I find your icon. Now I'll try...)

<=====

ZapNotes

Yep, not so much a "bad smell" as the stench of failure: the vendor providing an app whose sole function is to run through a list of about 40 other Notes processes killing them all, simply to allow the successful relaunch. Presumably the interconnects and dependencies between the processes are such that they must be started in a specific sequence and can't accommodate re-connection - probably not a trivial task but at the least Notes could detect this state and do the zapping automatically. Instead it became one of the hazing rituals for the new guy in the office: after Notes crashes how long will he spend wrestling with bizarro error messages and manually hunting down "Lotus Corporation" processes in Task Manager before asking for help?

At least the Lotus developers had some idea of how unstable their product was - some versions deployed to me forcibly set the "Dr Watson" handler (ie AEDebug registry key) to the Lotus fault reporting utility. Annoying - since us code monkeys had the key already nicely set for JIT crash debugging of crashes - but also grimly amusing that every time anything crashed on the PC "Notes" would shyly raise its hand and say "probably it's my fault - do you want to file a bug report?"

>> manufacturing cost ... likely to be dwarfed by the royalty payments.

Absolutely - Wikipedia has an "incomplete list" of companies with patents in the H264 patent pool, with 26 names! So if all of them decided to nominate 2.25% as their slice then 60% of the purchase price would go just on movie compression licensing - hardly "fair and reasonable" and in practice suicidal since such predation would collapse the market entirely. Two things might drive a company to decide otherwise (a) tragedy of the commons-esque scenario where each individual owner persuades themselves that they have to be the greediest one at the table or perish, or (b) this is a means for a FRAND contributor to attempt to refuse to licence their tech to a rival, by naming an intolerable price (though sticking it to just one rival fails the non-discriminatory aspect)

Having it tied to the price of the containing device rather than being a flat fee also seems curious - if MS decide to shove an SSD in the XBox 721 for an extra $100, should Moto really get $2.25 more for their WiFi+compression tech?

>> How come Moto's real patents are worth so much less than MS bogus patents?

Because Moto agreed to licence them on FRAND terms, thereby making them part of an essential standard. It's a pretty simple deal - get a modest payment for every single device using the tech in return for giving up the right to discriminate between users. If you don't like that then don't contribute the tech to a standard and try to licence it on a "voluntary" basis, charging whatever you like or just refuse to licence at all to certain rivals. Of course a standard will still be issued, but solving your part of the puzzle in some different way, probably using a competitor's patented tech instead. So when deciding whether to be FRANDly you've got plenty to think about: different investment models, just how essential is your tech, do you want to retain the "nuclear option" of injunctions. Oh, and even do you want to seem like a nice reasonable mature part of an ecosystem of companies creating the future? (of course in reality you're a vicious rodent that eats babies whenever it thinks noone is looking coz that's how the system works, but how do you want to seem?)

So MS gets its big FAT32 payouts precisely because it isn't part of a core standard. Instead they are a de facto standard that everybody cheerfully went along with because it made mounting disk-like devices on a Windows box easy and that made a large and lucrative group of users happy to buy such devices.

(of course it's a bundle of patents beyond FAT32, and quite likely others are similarly straightforward to bypass by other tech but also have strong roots in commercial inertia: it's notable that rich and feisty Samsung elected to licence rather than fight. But since the terms are all confidential maybe MS gave it away for a song simple to maintain the illusion of invulnerability and to get a better cudgel against other competitors...)

> you spend most of your fuel getting the rest of your fuel up to mere subsonic velocity

Although the diminishing returns with rockets are awful they aren't quite that bad. http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/SaturnV.pdf has some interesting figures from a moderately detailed simulation of a Saturn V launch:

Dry weight: 242 tonnes

Fuel mass at launch: 2657 tonnes

Fuel mass at mach 1: 1786 tonnes

So getting beyond sub-sonic used 1/3 of the total fuel mass but also got it to 7.9km altitude through the densest part of the atmosphere - even a high altitude maglev track will fall somewhat short of this. It would still be a fantastic saving though.

But perhaps the required increase in lateral strength would be problematic - for a conventional rocket almost all force is transmitted vertically, whereas even a gently curved track will add further sideways acceleration to the standard 1G experienced just by lying on its side.

@ PhilBuk

A whiff of deja vu raised the fleeting thought that I'd just found the secret hiding place of my old firm's Notes admin crew - some of their replies also played really well in the calming tones of HAL9000:

http://www.moviewavs.com/php/sounds/?id=bst&media=MP3S&type=Movies&movie=2001&quote=hal-fool.txt&file=hal-fool.mp3

Re: Ouroboros

@Ben Rose - Those images came from an image search for "notes splash screen" - having happily parted ways with it four years ago I've now no idea what the newest version was. But the same joke splash screen BMP worked fine through all the versions I was exposed to; I didn't make a fetish of copying it over the real ones, just did it whenever something unusually awful happened.

Maybe it's chalk-and-cheese different now, but I find it a little hard to believe not least because every update that we got was trumpeted as being wonderful, and I'm sure it was for the IS dept or the people who designed the databases or somebody else I never met, but as a humble victim it seemed relentlessly the same: the gratuitously weird UI remained gratuitously weird. I remember when the animated graphics accompanying the password entry got updated - the general sentiment around the office was the effort could have better spent on other UI aspects.

And "sucks a bit on the UI side" really is underplaying it - I'm looking at my inbox, I hit "CTRL-N", what should happen? Right back to early Mac apps 20 years before the ubiquitous semantic is "create a new document of the type most relevant to my context" and Notes supports this too - it brought up the "Create Database" interface. I never decided whether this was the proverbial "foolish consistency" (since that is an action that can be performed in any context maybe somebody fantasised it would be less confusing for the user) or maybe for true Notes lovers this is the most obvious and routine thing to want to do?

Sp(l)itting heres

If only I had an edit button I'd look so much less dumberer.

If only I proofread before hitting "submit" I'd look so much better able to adapt to circumstances in a mature fashion.

If only I was that out of character then friends would be waiting for the pod-person scream...

> scrawl "except for ZFS which is ok so far as we're concerned" somewhere in the middle of GPL2

You probably wouldn't want that - except for a limited set of exceptions the GPL is not modifiable. So if code is labelled as being GPL then you don't have to inspect it closely to see if they snuck in a clause "I get to sleep in Bazza's bed wearing big muddy boots" because if they did then it's not GPL at all.

Absolutely agreed that this incompatibility is a PITA - according to Wiki it comes from the CDDL side, with Sun electing to deliberately make it incompatible with GPL, for reasons apparently obscure (maybe idealist, maybe corporate screwing around). But such pains seem something of a virtue to the eyes of GNU stalwarts - better to lose some convenience than dilute essential not-as-in-beer-freedom.

Nitpick: "we've had a problem"

The use of present tense was extra drama for the movie - real life was slightly awesomer with the crew detailing the sequence of events, all remarkably calm. Well worth a couple of minutes of your coffee-time:

http://apollo13.spacelog.org/page/02:07:55:19/

(among the astronaut criteria is not being a mewling ninny who sobs for his mummy under stress, which is what I'd contribute to such moments)

> interstellar comet

Where do you get the "interstellar" angle from? The article you linked has "probably hails from the distant Oort Cloud" which is still part of the solar system, and believed to be the general source for long-period comets, i.e. no reason to believe this comet is spermier than others, just distinctive for the chance of a Mars money shot,

I completely understand Alistair's sentiments

As a parent and avid Sun reader it's only natural he hates a filthy paediatrician:

http://www.theonion.com/video/justin-bieber-found-to-be-cleverly-disguised-51yea,18178/

Re: Older Couple

Perhaps you forgot the troll icon? There's quite a gulf between what NASA seeks and Gunnery Sergeant Hartman produces.

Somebody with an interesting doctorate has worked independently on a novel problem, commonly for years with light supervision - this is the very stuff of judiciously applied imagination. And for the first intakes of the US manned program the original selection criteria demanded not just military but test pilots, i.e. people accustomed to systematically exploring the behaviour of a new and poorly understood vehicle, learning its problems, collaborating with engineering teams to develop solutions, and teaching others. Manned spacecraft have certainly become increasingly automated but remain finicky bespoke vehicles requiring a lot of hands-on care.

Modern airline pilots would be a better example for your thesis: Boeing engineers used to joke that the 777 would have a dog seat beside the pilot seat: pilot's job being to feed dog, dog's job to bite pilot if he fucks with the controls. However the aviation environment is far more forgiving and far better explored than rocketry and even so situations arise where pilots are necessary. So as a result airlines generally avoid fully exploiting flight automation to limit just-follow-orders behaviour where pilot stops thinking or goes to sleep.

Re: Addressing the symptoms, but not the cause?

Yay! a DB Geek by return of post...thanks for the detailed follow-up. I hadn't thought of undetected corruption in the lower stack/hardware as a factor; certainly nixes journalling likely problems, etc.

Re: So if the PC dies

But how appropriate that the MS spokesman for this was Mr Fark...

...while it's certain that most awful things in this world stem from incompetence rather than malice Microsoft's recent actions seem so stridently uncuddly that they smack of Götterdämmerung of the 3rd Reich sort, i.e. the belief that the common people have failed the majestic vision and are not worthy of it, all that remains is darkness and fall.

Re: Canbridge postgrads aren't what they used to be (sic)

@Ian McNee - Thanks for the direct links; I see now that the Bonneau content of this Reg story is a not-very-helpful rehash of his LBT posting which serves more to obscure than illuminate his argument (a simple link from the article would have been good). In fact his hash argument is far more sensible, that known broken ones are dropped forwith and replaced by existing tunably expensive approaches whose expense is maintained across time (though this requires servers to be built & maintained actively and intelligently, at least until the swamp of old and often homebrewed authentication & user management systems is drained & replaced with modules built and maintained by experts. However there's often a disjunction between academic work and real world crappiness).

But I do think he's making light of the difficulty for users to maintain separate strong passwords for many sites; this is one area where human brain is outstripped by the growth in servers needing authentication. And it's still simplistic to say that MD5 was broken by Moore's Law - present-day attacks would have been a lot more expensive in 1991 but if the algorithm wasn't flawed then we'd still be a long way from feasible brute-force collision generation.

And the dissertation was a good read (though a surprising amount of historical overview compared to many which get straight into novel brain fuckery on the third page; could quite sensibly appear as an article on a geek news site). So a virtual pint to Mr Bonneau by way of apology, and Reg Eds - next time you fillet somebody's work to make an article please link it!

Re: I'm sure I've heard this somewhere before...

You feel it's just a little sinister?

Re: Yay! —security through beer!

It's actually very good security - the purpose of a password scheme is to identify you as some degree of "friend" and surely you only let very good friends finger your pint?

Re: MASSIVELY IMPROVES SECURITY: End Of Windows

Still easy to block - just let the real user get locked out too! ie have the server implement increasing response delays and a lockout period after N failed guesses (where the period may be infinite, requiring a fleshy to beg the BOFH to unlock having reasonably convinced him of his bona fides, or at the least provided a good laugh through abject crawling)

Re: Canbridge postgrads aren't what they used to be

Yep, at least as related here reads more like a high school report than anything postgrad. He has a bee in his bonnet about Moore's Law:

* cites MD5 as having fallen to Moore's Law - of course what felled it is cryptologic research finding viable methods to generate hash collisions for chosen texts, ie it's a flawed algorithm.

* carefully documented the speed of password cracking improvement and finds that it tracks Moore's Law - well this suggests that he's only looking at the naivest brute-force schemes since ever-better dictionary & letter-substitution schemes have been adopted, naturally including harvested passwords and "use the initial letter of a memorable phrase"

* and he feels that salvation lies in inventing better hashing schemes, again to flee Moore's monster. Happily enough we already have these to hand in the form of the SHA series: received wisdom is that SHA-2 shows no sign of an impending algorithmic break, ie no crypto researcher is prising an interesting crack in it yet and and then there's the shiny new SHA-3 from the multi-year contest, intentionally different in structure to avoid a class break problem.

He's right to state that proper salting averts trivial lookup of hash dbs, but that has been the textbook wisdom for 35 years now (yep, lots of companies cock it up - but it's not for want of uni research).

Re: Make the Trap-Door function a lot slower

Here's one we prepared earlier! [*]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2

exactly the idea you propound - aim for a delay that is perfectly acceptable to fleshies but wastes horrific numbers of CPU cycles. An instructive real-world example of forcing infeasible costs upon a brute force attack:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbWg-mozGsU

[*] where "we" means not me at all, but clever people 13 years ago in a network working group far, far away

>> the intent of creating the framework of such an object

Put that way it sounds like a risky trick:

(1) United World Govts put out tender to procure materials to build a Death Star

(2) The ingenious Harriman executes the low bid, mining asteroids, etc

(3) UWG say "ha-ha! actually we've no idea how to build a real Death Star. And if we write you a cheque for that orbiting stockpile the electors will string us up. But don't worry about that - you've shown how resourceful you are and the potential is vast"

(4) The ingenious Harriman sets about creating a proper vengeance weapon - dispensing with an FTL drive and adding a fine objective to sear "CHEAPSKATE PUNK" on the arses of all involved.

>> admitting that whatever target architecture you are emulating has already won

Very sound point - Symbian fell afoul of this with *nix compatibility - originally there was a very cut-down stdlib implementation with the explicit goal of just barely getting the Java VM to run and the app story was "for full grunt learn to love Symbian C++ or go the MIDlet/applet way". And the story on grunt was impressive at the time: SOS was engineered so that sensibly-written code was both frugal and safe.

But it was apparent that native SOS C++ was a real deterrent (poor tools, mediocre documentation, source not available, no automation for porting) so large efforts were devoted to supporting much of the POSIX APIs, resulting in a large stack of code with unimpressive performance and inadequate POSIX compatibility (eg the set of independent SOS file and comms services were never perfectly hidden under file descriptors). So the trade-off was more apps but less differentiation from competing platforms; taken to an extreme for apps developers a SOS device would have just been an irritating variant on a *nix phone. And about the same time the traditional SOS advantage of frugality was bypassed by Apple & Android, as it became evident that the market was very happy to trade-off device cost and battery life against features and responsiveness: the microwatts saved by a native SOS app were irrelevant set against the big-screen backlight.

At least in the past the Microsoft answer was "Hotel California": make it extremely easy to port into your platform (be it document formats, keyboard mappings (Excel 2010 still has some Lotus 1-2-3 support), lots of good doco), and not such good support for leaving. Of course this doesn't address the needs of cross-platform developers looking to maintain a single code base but that used to be less common - and really you want your platform to capture and hold developers. Speaking as a developer this is of course EVIL, but their shareholders across a couple of decades have a different take.

Re: We're gonna die!

But half-full glass: the NASA U2 plane will be able to get some great views of its topside

It's but one more facet of the British stiff upper lip

Rude colonials may well "chunder" or "call ruth on the technicolour phone", brash Yankees might jitterbug about as if to call attention to their plight, benighted natives lacking even the rudiments of etiquette may even make noises when so afflicted. That's all as maybe; under such circumstances that prevent his retiring from the company in good time a true gentleman shall merely avert his face for the duration of the emesis (and his fellows shall of course make no direct reference to the matter, though among especially close comrades it is likely to be acceptable to ask whether the port should be passed past him). Thus this "mechanical Lawrence" is a splendid tool for addressing the most important of questions: how can the Englishman better avoid feeling socially inept when seriously ill?