Posts by A J Stiles

But it needs to be done

Irrespective of what it costs to break our dependency on the stuff, the fact remains that there is a finite and diminishing amount of oil in the ground. When it's gone, it's gone for good. The End.

We have exactly two choices. *Either* we make a serious start with the business of becoming independent of oil, taking whatever unpleasant decisions we have to along the way in the knowledge that the alternative is worse; *or* we face a future in which a series of increasingly-bloody battles are fought over the last few dregs of oil, followed by a return to a pre-Industrial Revolution lifestyle (assuming anywhere actually remains habitable; which is a big assumption, considering the nature and amount of weaponry at the disposal of the biggest oil-consuming nation on the planet).

I can remember them saying there was about enough oil left for another 30 years -- and that was 30 years ago.

@ Christopher Martin

10 litres is five two-litre bottles, or thirty 330ml. cans.

Get-out clause

Even if a requirement for a guarantee is introduced, I can see a massive get-out clause for Linux.

Free Software supplied in Source Code form should be treated like flat-pack furniture. The parts are guaranteed to fit together, is all. What you do with the article once you've built it is beyond the remit of the supplier. It's entirely up to *you* to verify its suitability for a particular purpose -- which might require you to engage an expert to assist you.

The Source Code allows you to go up to any programmer who knows the language in which it is written and say, "Will this program do what I want?" And if the answer turns out to be no, then the Source Code also allows any programmer who knows the language to *make* the program do what you want.

To all intents and purposes, the Source Code *is* the guarantee.

Good for her

We don't want queer-bashers in this country, thank you very much.

If Savage doesn't like that, he is welcome to go and complain to his imaginary sky-fairy.

Hmm

Dependency on technology is not necessarily a bad thing.

Dependency on *proprietary* technology is necessarily a bad thing, although you usually only find out when it's too late.

The best course for all concerned would be for the various Governments of the world simply to annul the disputed "intellectual property", thus hauling Intel's rug out from under them. (And maybe think about switching to ARM or MIPS. It's very easy to recompile the Source Code to run on a different architecture. Um ..... If you've got the Source Code, that is. Somebody help me get these worms back into this can .....)

Ted Kaczynski's error was in paragraph 208 et seq. Anyone who knows P * V = n * R * T can build a refrigerator -- unless Robert Boyle happens to be standing there with a big stick, demanding payment for the use of "his" discovery.

No rights being infringed

Nobody's rights are being infringed here. Entering the United Kingdom, other than from between the legs of a British woman, is not a right but a privilege. And furthermore, it is a privilege which is absolutely not extended to homophobic bigots.

We have enough of those here anyway.

Clearly

Clearly this is a propaganda exercise! By blurring out even artificial faces, Google are trying to make out that the blurring process is automatic and indiscriminate.

Or like

Or like the time that a Vauxhall advertisement shew a car driving off the edge of a high building to the tune of "Layla" by Eric Clapton?

(Look up the history of the song "Tears in Heaven", if you don't get it. And turn in your Blues badge.)

Broken anyway

The mere act of viewing adverts does not make money for anyone. Money is *only* made when somebody actually *buys* the product or service being advertised. An advertisement shown to somebody *and which does not result in a sale* is a wasted effort.

When companies actually get this, perhaps we can return to some sort of sanity? Please?

Lester Haines - Todger correspondent

Is Lester Haines's official job title "todger correspondent" ?

@ AC 14:43

The "bug" you describe refers to a behaviour where OpenOffice.org fails to connect to Windows network shares on servers whose names contain illegal characters. If you had read the Microsoft documentation, you would know about that. But you probably didn't get the manuals with your pirated copies of Windows and Office, did you, you filthy pikey?

I'm guessing that the OO.o development team probably have drier lentils to soak than clueless sysadmins with misconfigured networks. It's not as if you can't patch the Source Code to bypass the check anyway, if you really prefer a horribly broken network.

Operator Overloading == FAIL

Operator Overloading is a recipe for fail. Don't even go there. An operator should mean one thing, and one thing only.

In JavaScript, the "+" operator is overloaded. You think it means add numbers; but it can also mean concatenate strings, like the . operator in Perl and PHP. But JS, like Perl and PHP, doesn't distinguish between numbers and strings. So you can think you're incrementing a value; but if the interpreter thinks it was a string as opposed to a number, you end up multiplying it by ten and then incrementing it.

I have now resorted to subtracting negative numbers whenever I want to add, and concatenating an extra "" between strings.

And to those smug b******s among you who will inevitably say "It's not an issue with overloaded opewators, it's an issue with dynamic typing. If attempting to add a number and a stwing thwew an exception, thereby forcing you to perform explicit type-conversion, it wouldn't be a pwoblem" : you're half-right, but why the hell should I have to tell the computer what's a string and what's a number? It's a freaking computer and it ought to be able to work that out for itself, dammit.

WTF?

It doesn't need software to prevent another credit crunch!

All it needs is a law against lending borrowed money to a third party without the explicit consent of the person who lent it to you -- and not in advance before you borrowed it and buried in small print, either, but at the actual time you lend it on.

Well, and for that to be rigidly enforced, with heavy penalties for offenders, obviously.

curl?

Isn't that a library / cli app for downloading, which forms the basis of more than one package management system? Or am I thinking of something else?

Dan Brown

It's a good job I read "Digital Fortress" *after* A&D and tdVC because if I'd read it first, I'd never have touched the others.

Never mind the one-dimensional stereotype characters, or the fact that given what Brown obviously knows about cryptography he could barely be trusted to spell PGP correctly; he lost a good few points in my estimation for getting the name of the currency of Spain wrong.

WTF?

I thought there was still a requirement for non-obviety in patent applications.

This would be obvious to an expert in the field and should never have been approved.

Parental choice is to blame

Parental choice of schools is where the problem really began. League Tables are, after all, only required in order to help parents choose a school for their children.

In the Bad Old Days, when you were told which school you should send your kids to and that was that, there were just as many Ineducable Little Scrotes as there are today. (Well, maybe fewer. Some of them might have been educable by means of the then-not-banned cane. Yes, it teaches them that violence is a good way of solving their problems; but they already suspected that.) But without some parents having the option to remove their children to what they perceived as a “better” school, the negative influence of the ILSs was moderated somewhat by the presence of the better-behaved kids. Thus, they were less able to harm the most vulnerable children: the ones whose parents would never have been able to remove them in practice, even if the choice had been available.

Nowadays, the parents who can, choose a "good" school for their kids. Those who, for whatever reason, are unable in practice to send their kids to such a school are doomed to have their children's education destroyed by a disproportionate number of walking Durex adverts. This is the real legacy of abolishing the eleven-plus: a Secondary Modern education for all.

Alicia Silverstone - pah

No doubt somebody will point out that Alicia Silverstone being an ovo-lacto-vegetarian is not really doing much less damage that a full-on m**t-eater, and that anyone who is not a vegan is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

And someone will undoubtedly castigate that vegan for still contributing to environmental damage by cooking their food, and that raw veganism is The Way.

This will be followed in turn by someone else pointing out that raw veganism is still causing unnecessary suffering to plants, and that everyone who is not a fruitarian is a raging hypocrite.

All this is remeniscent of little boys engaging in pissing contests because they can't think of anything more interesting to do with their dicks.

@ Flocke Kroes

I'm with you. Konqueror FTW!

This fast, customisable, extensible, standards-compliant browser doesn't get nearly enough mention.

Oh dear

And so *this* is what the future of mobile telephony is going to be: Nothing but attempts to copy whatever Apple do.

It already happened on the desktop. Windows, Gnome, KDE -- they are all trying to be like the Mac. Nobody dares to do anything innovative anymore because then, they might be less Mac-like. The DEs that borrowed their inspiration straight from BeOS or NeXTSTeP are more-or-less dead, used only by hardcore fans.

Maybe Ted Kaczynski was right after all.

evoting = impossible

Christian Berger is spot on; but even among a fully computer-literate population, electronic voting would still be unworkable.

There's still no way to verify that the machines really are running the same program whose Source Code you checked.

Direct-recording mechanical voting machines might be acceptable, if they were close enough to universally comprehensible; but they still don't need any less scrutiny than paper ballots, and are really only workable for first-past-the-post elections. For transferrable votes, nothing beats pencil and paper.

Nothing ensures the integrity of the count like have it being done by representatives of the candidates or the candidates themselves. Nobody trusts anyone else, so they only way they can agree is if they are all telling the truth.

Hmm

The iPhone registered developer programme sucks.

It sucks about as much as buying a tape recorder and then finding out you have to spend a fortune buying the special microphone that goes with it, if you want to make any recordings of your own.

You have three options, besides claiming a cash refund because the goods were not as described: Pay under protest for the special mic; try and borrow a special mic off someone else (but they are being discouraged against lending them out); or attempt to bodge a standard mic into the weirdy socket (note the dire warnings on the danger of electric shock and/or damaging the machine, some of which may be exaggerated in a deliberate attempt to discourage you from doing this).

UK and EU consumer law means Apple aren't allowed to use the courts to prevent you from doing things with stuff you own; but it doesn't mean they have to make it easy for you, either.

Bgeh

Won't affect me. I use kpdf or okular.

There are always more good people looking at the Source Code of a Free Software project than there are evil people looking at the Source Code of that project; therefore, it is a reasonable assumption that any bug is more likely to be found first by a good person (who will fix it) than by an evil person (who will use it for nefarious purposes).

Hmm

Let's look at this logically:

P1. Flu is caused by a virus.

P2. He who eats an undercooked pork product will be summoned in short order to the bathroom, and there receive a brief but stern lecture upon the benefits of thoroughly cooking one's food. With full orchestral accompaniment.

P3. The two-bob bits is caused by bacteria.

P4. Viruses are easier to kill than bacteria.

Given premises P1, P2, P3 and P4, we can deduce a conclusion C:

C. If pork has been cooked thoroughly enough to kill bacteria, then there will definitely be no viruses in it.

DBAN

DBAN does fine, as long as the drives are still working. And it's verifiable, because the drive still works afterward. You can send it to any data recovery company you like, and none of them will get you back a single byte of your original data.

The only reason the intelligence agencies pretend they can recover data from even one overwrite cycle is that they don't want to give away the fact that the actual techniques they use, don't involve the drive at all.

POIDH

erm ..... sorry ..... *audio clip* or it didn't happen.

But .....

Has anyone studied the difference between boars and sows with the pig 'flu?

@ Tony Hoyle

"By GPLing their client library they made it impossible for anyone to use it unless they were producing GPL software, or they paid for a license for every client at £200 a copy."

What's the problem? You wouldn't have had to pay a single penny for licences, if you just released your software under the GPL.

"We tried to negotiate with MySQL - pointing out that was four times the retail of the entire product ..... They wouldn't budge"

No; because the whole freaking idea of the GPL is to encourage you to release your software under the GPL. It's called reciprocity; if you benefitted from the hard work of others, then others deserve to benefit from your hard work. Evidently, you preferred to spit your dummy out of your pram. And now, people looking specifically for GPL applications will have one fewer choice to consider.

Postgres is poisoned

Postgres is poisoned, as it is released under a BSD licence. This licence, dating as it does from an earlier time, does not oblige vendors to make their modified versions Open Source. Thus, IBM (or anyone) could alter Postgres subtly but incompatibly, cage up the Source Code and lock you in.

It's not called the "Bait, Switch, Destroy" licence for nothing.

At least the MySQL codebase is under the GPL, so it could always be taken over by someone else if Oracle seem to be neglecting their duties.

Slight Flaw

There's a slight flaw in that plan.

Copyright-infringing sites may not be generating any advertising revenue; either deliberately because their owners don't include adverts, or accidentally because the people who visit those kinds of sites use aggressive advert-blocking techniques.

@ Sam York

What's wrong with the IEC 60309 connector is that, being an established standard, there's no way to patent it, form a cross-licencing cartel and block any new players from entering the market by charging outrageous royalties.

Or am I getting cynical in my old age?

How to do it

How to survive the eBay purchasing process:

1. Treat any eBay purchases as a pure gamble. Never, ever bid even one penny more for an item than you could afford to lose (as in, never see again, ever) if anything goes amiss.

2. When buying anything over £10, use the "ask seller a question" feature. If they can't answer questions satisfactorily, don't bid.

3. Always pay by postal order, made out to "cash", bought from a busy urban post office (not that there are any rural ones left anymore under Labour). Post it to the vendor using a self-sealing envelope, with a self-adhesive stamp (saliva is full of DNA); and put nothing in the envelope which might identify you, or whatever you might be buying, to anyone who might intercept the postal order in transit.

4. The most important rule of eBay: If you can get it anywhere else -- get it there.

Hmm

Those of us who remember what the 1980s were really like (as opposed to the romanticised versions portrayed in the media) may remember "magnetic bubble memory", which was always supposed to be the Next Big Thing. Till it vanished from the face of the earth.

Surprised nobody, around the time cores were taking over from drums, built a box using both a drum and a solid-state cache big enough to hold an entire repeating loop of a decent length. With careful programming, it'd've blistered along .....

@ AC 09:59

That's a brilliant idea.

If you could make it not render properly in IE, I think I would like to have your babies.

Yes BMI = bollocks

BMI is pretty meaningless, indeed. But it looks impressive, to stupid people who are easily impressed.

You might just as well say that the perfect weight is your height minus 1, times 100. (Which is a fancy way to say ignore the whole metre, and treat the remaining centimetres as kilos.) So if you are 1m60 tall then you should weigh 60kg., if you are 1m80 tall then you should be weighing 80kg, if you are a full 2m. tall then 100kg. (And you shouldbe paying double on the buses for taking up seats on both upstairs and downstairs decks, you great big freak :) ) This is really no more riduculous than using BMI.

The idea of charging airline passengers by the kilo can be shown to be flawed. An unladen 747-400 weighs 178756 kg. and can carry 526 passengers and crew. That means, there is already 340kg. of plane for each person on board! Doesn't sound so reasonable now, eh?

bus tickets

Paul McCartney said "If you get on a bus you've got to pay. And I think it's fair you should pay your ticket."

But if you then walk or ride a bike to the same place, the bus company don't come chasing after you demanding payment. Also, there is nothing to stop other bus companies offering cheaper fares to the same destination, if they can afford it.

The Rules Have Changed. Forever.