Posts by Tom Cooke

"Boring"

I know there are strong feelings on both sides, but how many people here *know* how hard it is to produce and evolve functional, stable consumer electronics products, especially computing ones? Sure, we can all hack together programs that do stuff, most of us could probably manage to build a PC out of packaged parts, and some of us even use a soldering iron, but taking parts (e.g. processors, graphics cards) that are themselves still-wet new, and wrapping them with new drivers and support into an updated product, that can be shipped to tens of thousands of people and work solidly for 99.9% of them out of the box (and keep doing so for years) is a feat of engineering that most of us have no clue about. Same about cars; I find it a miracle that I can leave my car out in all weathers, drive it whenever I want, and I expect it to start first time and go perfectly every day - well done, Chrysler.

So give Apple a break!

@Dave Bell

"I am slightly inclined to the view that the math of particle physics has become so complicated that we may be doing something wrong. Look up epicycles, Kepler, and Newton."

Brilliant comment - see also "saving the appearances", and page William of Ockham while you're up :-) :-)

T'interweb

So now we have interplanetary IP protocols *and* Google Mars, and a successful first test of hardware for Constellation (Ares/Orion). Also I finished my Airfix Space Shuttle :-) :-)

Welcome to the 21st Century, I'm loving it.

British rocketry

May only be fiction, but *somebody* has to mention Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle, "Rockets in Ursa Major" - fictional British space program set in the days after the Second World War, complete with handlebar moustaches. They don't make 'em like they used to - but dammit they used to!

Bank security

I have a friend whose dad is loaded. He (my friend's dad) runs a business with a partner, and they have a security arrangement with their bank involving passwords and so on. He's known (as many entrepreneurs, I guess) not to suffer fools gladly. One day, some punter rang up the bank claiming to be him and requesting a large funds transfer. The bank guy asked for the password and got the response "I'm a busy man, dammit, just get on with or I'll close the account". He duly transferred the cash (!). Real account holder notices, rings up and is told "Oops, very sorry, we'll let you pay back the missing cash on easy terms". Account holder goes ballistic and says "I don't have any missing cash, that's out of the bank's pocket or I'm moving my account right now". He got his money back.

Next time I get a sales call from my bank I intend to do some social engineering to get them to give me confidential data on my account without doing a DPA (they pretty much did this to me once before but I was too pissed off and also busy to take advantage of it). If I can trip them into it again, I'm going to sue their ass off.

Future computer security

If you want to *really* be frightened by what problems will exist for computer security people in the future, read "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge. Imagine backdoors built into systems by their designers, that can be accessed by microscopic nodes in a pervasive wireless network that you can control from anywhere without any visible input..................

Cars

Everyone remember the old joke that if Microsoft built cars, you'd have to <insert list of stuff here>. Now they've brought out a car where *they* tell you what roads the car can drive down. Unbelievable!

Gets my vote

This is now up on the UK store too. 2GB, 120GB, SuperDrive, nVidia graphics, I think these will sell like hot cakes - especially since these are fully good to go with Snow Leopard when it arrives. Nice one, Apple!

Dynamic linker

Just to prove I was listening..... Isn't random memory location of the dynamic linker one of the new security features believed to be in Snow Leopard - in which case this vulnerability goes away again :-)

Windows in operating theatre?

When I worked in the NHS, the only 'general-purpose' computing equipment (as opposed to monitors etc with embedded chippery) permitted in the operating theatres was special 'hardened and certified' kit (think it was running some kind of Citrix) approved by US and UK medical device agencies, and we were told CATEGORICALLY (I worked in IT) that no way would we ever get any of our standard Windows or *nix kit in there that was deployed elsewhere in the Trust. What donkey changed that policy?

Even better Mac Backup

(yes, I remember Travan, still have the tapes in the loft!)

I use SuperDuper for Mac, brilliant program - OK, so my iBook hard drive is only 40 GB or some Jurassic size, but it holds all my e-stuff since about 1980 (I don't use an iPod, or take many digital pics). So I bought an 80GB external USB drive and a 32GB Flash stick, and do a full backup to each once using SuperDuper (maybe 8 hours a pop), then a daily incremental alternately to each, takes maybe 30 minutes with auto-shutdown at the end so it's click the button and go to bed.

House sets on fire, I grab the USB stick and I'm good.

Ho hum

Hasn't this advert been on the goggle box for months? Slow news day :-)

Strange list

This is a very odd list; it's a mixture of stuff that's genuinely worth pointing out e.g. 'validate your inputs', with stuff that a well-designed operating system and underlying security model shouldn't let you do anyway - I mean, making sure you don't violate memory bounds? If you told the OS in advance the size of the memory, should it not just throw an error if you try? I'm no modern OS expert, but I'd expect stuff like that out of the box.

I'd like to see an alternative list which gives 25 most useful tips for making programs useful, maintainable - "don't hard-code values from your data", "define things once", "put in adequate comments", "write the documentation" (gasp!).

@Gordon Ross

You mean you don't have hot-swap routers available in case of hardware failure, that you can swap in and cycle back when the upgrade is done *gasp*

@Pete B - amazing

I'm right there with you - A-MAZE-ING (in the words of Craig Revel Horwood). Within the last two weeks we've also seen NASA sign commercial cargo-lift contracts with two companies. As I posted in that thread, it really feels like finally the *twentieth* century is getting off the ground :-)

I don't care if I never go, but I want to live to see what James Blish describes at the beginning of "Cities in Flight" - commercial passenger and cargo launches to space being as routine and normal as jumbo jet takeoffs are at Heathrow today.

Yes!

Yes! It's 2009 and finally we are entering the era that most sci-fi writers of last century assumed we would have been in for 30 years by now. I haven't got the words to say how much I hope we have a manned expedition to Mars in my lifetime.

Me too

I got chased (and threatened with legal action) for non-payment of poll tax in a town where I've never lived. I sent them lots of evidence, and they dropped it - but they wouldn't tell me where the mistake had occurred because - guess what - as the person they were chasing turned out not really to be me, the Data Protection Act wouldn't let them give me any information!!!

Well deserved

Well done, richly deserved. Who was the last fantasy/sci-fi author to be so honoured? I can only think of Arthur C Clarke, knighted ten years ago. A positive move for all fantasy enthusiasts and goes to reinforce that SF is not just for a minority but deserves a place in mainstream literature.

@JonB and others

Yes, it's amazing how emotional we all get about these. Anyone remember alpha, beta and dsl from the Cambridge University Engineering Department?

Oracle?

Hmm, maybe my brain core is underclocked but I thought that there are a lot of database-type operations which respond very well to parallelisation (with appropriate lock and cache management). Didn't there used to be Oracle Parallel Server? Presume it has now morphed to Oracle 9i10g11xyzpqr :-)

Unfortunate name

"Spare" as a company name seems intriguing, until you visit their Web site and see an invitation for corporates to become a Spare Part(ner) - oops!

What a waste of time

What a pointless exercise - cats and dogs are relatively easy to care for, if you have any sense of responsibility at all. They should concentrate on educating people that other creatures are MUCH harder than they think to look after properly - birds especially (parrots, crows, any birds of prey) need way more stimulation and focus than mangy fourlegs.

Hubble electrical replica

Hommage to 2001 where they ran a duplicate of HAL back Earthside and made it go mad the same way :-)

Bare motherboards

Er, isn't this just going back to the good old days when you had fridge-sized multiprocessor servers (anyone remember Pyramid?) with a card cage with - guess what - bare CPU and memory boards? OK, the technology and interconnect is different, but they designed it the way they did for a REASON, guys! :-)

Tape for 11/750?

Oh, you make me cry, how long is it since I booted one of those babies?

Impossible!

Totally impossible to choose just one from this list!!!!

Harrison Ford

Erm... This was almost the exact plot of Tom Clancy's "Executive Orders" - I acknowledge all of the experts' comments, however Clancy does his homework and he made a good case that a *state sponsored* terrorist organisation might well be able to have a fair crack at making this work.

Anyone remember The Link?

Anyone?

Damn stupid ads

The ads are *supposed* to be annoying - the idea of marketing is "brand recall" as well as actually creating desire for the product. If everybody who's surveyed by some opinion poll guy on the street says "Phones 4u - damn stupid ads" when asked to name a mobile phone retailer, then the ad campaign has worked :-)

Multics

Please please please someone write an emulator this will run on!

Ahem

Just to be clear; they haven't 'made' anything, all they've done is copy something that already existed (admittedly, the lab technique is difficult) and change it. If I photocopy the Mona Lisa and give her glasses and a moustache with a marker pen, have I 'made' a great masterpiece?

In order to be able to claim they made any kind of life, they'd have to meet the conditions that used to be imposed for making functionally-equivalent BIOS chips without getting sued i.e. build it from scratch *never having seen the original code*. I'd submit this is something we'll never see done in a lab.

"Nobody yet uses Office 2007"?

Erm... We have moved to Excel 2007 pretty much only because we can have more columns; we have planning software that stores more values per calendar period than you can shake a stick at, and we needed more values and more calendar periods... Now if only Microsoft would release a version of Access that supports >2GB in a single file, my evil empire would be complete, mwahahaha.

Responsibility

"So as long as we are aware of the potential consequences of such research, and accept the massive responsibility that comes with our burgeoning power over life itself, there is nothing ethically wrong with such studies"

What possible evidence is there that we have acted responsibly in any of the previous instances where we've gained power over these kinds of things? Accepting responsibility means that sooner or later there are things we agree to completely rule out - can someone suggest a significant choice we have made not to do something we could do, in the last ten years?

Wow!

This is an amazing creature! Pity there won't be any DNA so they can work out how this fits together with modern eagles and hawks..........

U**x, anyone?

Thought Microsoft didn't want anyone to do this stuff? Thought it was all 'policies' this, and 'locked-down desktops' the other, and GUI for everyone....................

Life imitates art...

A clear example of life imitating art - the article mentions "Footfall", wasn't it in this sci-fi novel that Pournelle et al imagine, guess what, sci-fi writers hidden under Cheyenne Mountain saving the world from intelligent space-faring elephants.

I'm all in favour, personally.

Two Euro coin?

Never seen one. Can't we use good ol' decimal on here :)

Well, they finally did it

"Illegal" to implant these embryos in the womb? Exactly how is this law going to be be enforced. Read Robert Heinlein's "Friday" if you want to find out where this will take us............

Displaying padlock symbol? Duh

Er, am I missing something? How is it relevant that a Web page displays a padlock for secure link? There's no obvious link between a Web page securely communicating with the server, and the people who run that server not being crooks?!?!!