Posts by PeteA
23 posts • joined Saturday 10th December 2011 00:12 GMT
Re: Phew!
You're going to re-invent C?
Re: "The saga began after of Canadian"
Not allowed to downvote myself, sadly, but I missed the closing bracket which deserves a serious kipper
Re: "The saga began after of Canadian"
News that isn't run by illiterate monkeys? If you find one, please let me know the source (hell, these days I'll be happy with literate monkeys, or any other literate species [better not be discriminatory at either a phylum or kingdom level]
Re: And I thought the UK was bad?
Because the 2nd half of the act amounts to a charter to overrule the first; maintaining the authority of the judiciary and protection of morals are both classics used by authoritarian governments (of which, sadly, I fear the UK's has become). Maybe I should use the tinfoil-hat icon (damn, don't have one - Ed., please add before you go to the pub) but there's a reason I now routinely use a VPN-that-isn't-like-HMA (see https://vpn.hidemyass.com/vpncontrol/privacy.html and http://security.cbronline.com/news/second-lulzsec-hacker-faces-arrest-following-hidemyass-disclosure-report-270911) and have a high Wife Acceptance Factor despite the inconvenience (I'm also lucky enough to have a great wife :) )*
* the alternative statement commanded a 2nd try at virginity...
Thanks
Unusually, the moronic drivel passing as comments and interspersed with occasional bits of lucidity has helped me to considerTypeScript. As an old fogey who routinely dismisses MS's latest effort on the basis of it being MS, it's nice to see a set of cogent arguments pointing out why I should bother to take a look. For those who say it's MS-only, typing the precise command sequence given on the TypeScript home page ("npm install typescript ... tsc helloworld.ts") worked perfectly on my Arch box with the exception of me not having written helloworld.ts; I think I can probably forgive them that
I'd welcome a rational comparison of TypeScript vs CoffeeScript vs JavaScript; personally, I do write multi-thousand line programs in JavaScript and actually think it's a very elegant language when used properly (my first language was Z80 assembler, btw, with C then C++ being the natural successors - so I am quite familiar with typed languages!) though very easy to make mistakes with. Modules / closures / 1st-class functions are all just ways of segmenting memory as we've done since the beginning in various ways. I still remember my introduction to C++ and being horrified to discover that I couldn't just malloc() a block of memory and do whatever I wanted with it - at that point in time, keeping track of memory blocks and what was in them was 2nd nature so handing control over to the computer felt very un-natural. Even after grudgingly accepting this, I spent a significant period of time writing (myPointer*)(void*)someRandomThing* and waving two fingers at the casting system because "I knew better". I didn't. The point of this rant is that actually C++ automated details for me and allowed me to concentrate on the functionality, which is what we're paid for.
If TypeScript is (1) truly mutliplatform [*cough* Silverlight] which it does in fact seem to be based upon a 30 second investigation after 5 pints of beer, and (2) not tied with you-are-pwned legalese as *all* the big companies seem to do, then it seems well worth investigation. For me, the name of the company that primarily sponsors a project is immaterial; it is a combination of the legal encumbrance and the technical merit that is important.
Beer, because I'm working on a death-march project atm and have had far too much tonight (both the project and the beer).
Re: Good idea, but...
Prior art
Nearest fire engine != right fire engine
Hopefully they'll remember to factor little things like state into account - it might be nearest, but completely unusable due to having just used all of the supplies at another fire. Or the crew could be completely exhausted. Seems obvious, but it's the kind of thing that has a nasty habit of getting overlooked.
Redefining wetware?
Sorry, but wetware is already a standard part of the computing stack - it sits in front of the hardware and interfaces with the software, usually with the assistance of peripheral hardware such as mice and keyboards. For example,
"Why couldn't we access our remote office yesterday - was it a hardware problem or the software?"
"Oh, it was just the wetware - lusers watching the Olympics and saturating the connection"
And yes - I do know that we should be using QoS
Posted in Marlinspike demos MS-CHAPv2 crack
PPTP???
Does anyone still use it? Seriously?? As the article points out, it's been known to be broken since last century.
Re: FAO: Fashtas
Ctrl + Esc != logo key, even in Windows.
Posted in MySQL's growing NoSQL problem
NewSQL
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Just search for what I entered
Instead of doing word-stemming, "did you mean ... " (no, I didn't, otherwise I'd have typed it) and other annoying "cleverness". Let me enter a predicated condition again [this AND (that OR "the other")]Time after time people try to make computers "intelligent" and fail miserably (Bob, anyone?); leave the intelligence to a human, and just give me a way of expressing my intention without your systems deciding that because there were only three results then I must have meant something different. If there were three results then it was usually because I'd narrowed down the search criteria sufficiently (and occasionally a typo, which was pretty easy to spot!)
Re: A Damning Statement About the Windows Ecosystem
Damn, I loathe Windows, but sad to say from an objective viewpoint Windows is actually starting to look pretty good on the security front and I truly dislike this type of unthinking post.
Vista and above *do* have admin / normal users, and arguably the sandboxing / separation is actually better than in the Linux GUI. For example, it's possible for a user-level process with X authority to send input events to a sudo'ed process - UAC in Windows, though incredibly annoying and badly implemented, prevents that attack.
Arguably, the *nix philosophy of "protect the operating environment" is obsolete because the stuff that matters now isn't the machine, it's the data... and the data is owned by the user, not by root. If some Evil Person manages to trash my OS, I'm really not that bothered (it's a mild inconvenience). But if they get hold of my personal info then I am. The problem is that the former requires root / admin and is heavily guarded against by Linux (somewhat by Windows these days), whereas the latter is the true problem and neither OS has a robust answer.
Ironically, the best true security design I've seen is actually Android aka Linux - it's just perceived as insecure because it relies upon the end user to make important decisions, and most of them can't. But, at the end of the day, as soon as there's a buffer overflow etc. it falls.
Re: So what if Win8 fails? Win9 wins....?
There's an SP2 for Vista? I thought they'd just called the service pack "Windows 7".
Because it runs better on my phone
Title is optional
RAID 1 is a mirror, i.e. every drive has a spare so 'N+N' redundancy characteristics, which is rather better than RAID 5 (N+1). You're confusing it with RAID 0...
They're both curious and not computer literate; enough education to know that you don't click on links in spam email, but not enough to know that you don't invoke any function that could potentially execute hostile code (in the form of javascript) without thinking about what you're doing.
Posted in Microsoft mum on leaked Phone OS plans
I've used one
It was crap.
Although my Android phone isn't perfect, and nor are my colleagues iPhones, they're all useable. Trying WP7 in a shop (before I chose Android, btw) was a complete WTF? experience, whereas trying the other two was a "Oh, OK, I see how that works...".
Incidentally, none of the emails I get on my Xperia are scanned by anyone, because I use my own mail infrastructure thank-you-very-much. The platform made that very easy to achieve.
No, it isn't about Microsoft code
It's about the hashing algorithm, which the paper explains quite clearly. So, although Ruby, v8, PHP and Java don't use the MS code, they _do_ use similar algorithms with the exact same problems. If you go back to the original paper, it's interesting to note that the original target was actually a Linux machine.
The real question here is that the underlying issue has been known since 2003 and only addressed by Perl and CRuby until now...
I write commercial software where performance is important (though not life or death critical). Frankly, these days, I'm far more concerned about the exponent to O [given a typical unbounded nO^e asymptotic performance equation] rather than the value of n, because n doesn't usually have a truly significant variance between languages. When I'm doing things a million times it's a lot more important as to whether the equation is O(f(n)) or O(f(n^2)); in the latter case I do everything one million times. It's a bit like arguing over the register parameters vs. stack parameters calling convention - on a modern machine, including embedded systems, it makes neither any subjective difference nor minimal objective difference as to which of the conventions is used. However, choosing the right of library, understanding it, and apply that knowledge efficiently are critical IMHO.
IMO, the potential advantages of the LLVM toolchain are significant regardless of the effectively immaterial performance difference. LLVM is taking an extremely-good-but-dated toolchain and applying *nix principles to it by decomposing it into a suite of independent applications that "do one thing, and do it well". The claim that it's more efficient may be dubious (probably - I don't know; there'll be some dodgy benchmark somewhere to prove it though),
If any commercial/professional FLOSS developers disagree with my viewpoints, I'd welcome a constructive debate!
Paris, because I'm so stoned I've got no idea what I'm doing or saying.
The only problem
is that NONE of the shops that I CAN buy from have the configuration that I DO want. Of course, that's part of why I build my own machines (and knowing exactly what went into them - I have a fairly low attrition rate due to buying good quality components in the first place). For the average user, though, there's no choice - you go to the shop and you get sold a machine with Windows on (unless you've got enough money to go to the shop where they sell you one with OSX)
Wow
So, the best recommendation for WP7 is that nobody hated it... (they just preferred the alternatives)?
Wrong law...
The problem with this argument is that the crime was mostly committed in Nigeria, Thailand and Taiwan - so, any laws that were broken were those of Nigeria, Thailand and Taiwan respectively... not those of the US
This seems like another example of the States trying to export their laws (rather like they tend to with "hackers"). Although I hate these scams as much as the next person, the internet as most of us want it to be relies on not being controlled by one country or faction.
Originally, the individual ISP's were responsible for the behaviour of their users. Clearly that's no longer feasible, but we need to find a way to keep the internet as a confederation of networks (as it was originally) rather than a hierarchical structure ultimately controlled by a single jurisdiction.
Paris, because nobody else is dumb enough to fall for these scams anyway.
