Posts by DrXym

Re: Mr J. Assange, apparantly.

Julian's mistake (aside from everything else) was to continuously provoke the US while hiding in an embassy. He had such a hate hard-on for Hillary that he actively interfered in the US 2016 elections. No doubt that this above all other things caused the US to try and extradite him.

I've had my gripes about the UI and some are questionable but honestly I've gotten used to the changes. Far more important to me is the actual quality of rendering, the add-on ecosystem and Mozilla's emphasis on privacy that is lacking in other browsers. Without exaggeration I've saved man months of download / scrolling / nuisance time just from blocking ads and other crap because of Firefox.

Google & Microsoft obviously make money through advertising and everything they enable or disable in their browser has to be seen through that lens. The add ons they allow, the privacy defaults, the settings you can change. And in the future you will get things that will erode privacy even further whether you like it or not - FLoC for example.

Re: $2.15? Is that all?

That's class action lawsuits for you. Every now and again I'll get some letter from the US saying how I'm a victim in class action payout, usually for such a pissy amount it would cost me more to respond or cash the cheque.

The lawyers who launch them don't really give a shit about fighting for a fair settlement - only about their own fees. Presumably they're very adept at pitching the lowest amount cash settlement that a victim company will pay to make them go away and move onto the next target.

Re: Project Fear

If I can get into a company's shoddy intranet then I can still rob their cloud service keys and do pretty much anything I like. So it's true that companies have crap security but I don't see cloud solving that problem. In a way it just outsources competence and gives a false sense of security.

A better way to raise the bar is to start making company directors personally liable for data breaches up to and including criminal charges. Make their companies take security audits the same way they take financial ones. It might encourage them to act preemptively for once.

Re: password managers

Password Safe saves your passwords to a file on the disk. This file is encrypted with a master password. It doesn't save to the cloud. Of course you could make it save to the cloud if the password file was on Google Drive or similar.

Re: "talent Hoover."

Read "The FACE of Amazon" - https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/

Most of those people weren't wanting to start a union.

Re: Surprised

Microsoft have tried other ways to hide irrelevant crap. I still remember expanding menus and their ilk. The point for me is they've developed something that shows me the stuff I need for what I'm doing and if I want to change what I'm doing (e.g. I want to switch from drawing shapes to reviewing a document), I can click on a tab and that other stuff is there.

I think the ribbon bar is a huge improvement for applications which are overwhelmed by their functionality. Instead of showing everything they show what you need. The place I see it most is not in an office app but in some CAD software. There are two parametric CAD applications called Fusion 360 and one called FreeCAD. I think you can guess which is the open source product from it's name. Aside from their license model they basically do the same thing. But Fusion 360 has an incredibly clean ribbon bar while FreeCAD throws the kitchen sink at you. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind which product suffers as a result.

Re: Headline:

It's not so that they "hate" customers as traditionally they expect you use their software on a closed network where machinery, PLCs, switches, sensors etc. implicitly trust one another. And there physical barriers, locked cabinets etc to keep it safe from attack.

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Industry 4.0 is a buzzword some manufacturers are now embracing where they'll have to take security far more seriously. In that model, devices will be able to publish information up to the cloud so there will have to be secure communications and some kind of proxy router to facilitate that without putting the factory at risk.

Re: At workers' expense

Did any Virgin branded company treat their workers badly? Branson has some questionable tax arrangements and other questions to answer but his companies look run of the mill compared to their peers for good or ill.

The same could not be said of Bezos where complaints about micro management, backstabbing, minimum wages, unfair dismissals, firing by computer are endemic and clearly part of the culture.

Re: Transportation

He's Australian. He'll be stuck on the first plane home. Australia is as pissed off with him as anyone else and will doubtless do what they can to make sure he stays put.

It wouldn't surprise me if he ends up in Russia eventually. After all he's been their puppet for some time now.

Re: Cartel's mule

I bet the cartels are already mulling that option. A small drone with some solar panels and batteries hooked up to a rudder and a satnav. Assuming it can charge and make more progress than the tides or current then it doesn't have to be fast, it just has to get to where it's going.

Re: Another dimension of complexity

Idiomatic C++ is kind of a unicorn thing since code is going to smear across time. Few projects are blessed (or cursed) to rewrite themselves to the latest C++ standard when one appears. And C++ code will probably need to call C libraries in places or will have C-esque code for one reason another, e.g. reading data into a buffer.

And even the latest C++ isn't going to enforce object lifetimes, thread safety etc. That doesn't even get into the traps that C++ lays in its language for the unwary - inadvertent copying, the rule of 3 (or 5), virtual destructors, implicit constructors, nullptr and all the rest.

So I don't see that it's hugely better. It's not hard to find CVEs in large mature codebases written in C++ along similar lines to those written in C.

Re: Outrage

Your non sequitur is a non sequitur.

Re: How will it not damage competition

Countries can and do block the sale of companies to foreign investors. It would happen most frequently with arms & defence firms but it could happen with any that the country felt sufficiently about to hold onto.

I've spent decades on Win32 and it is fine for a basic program, e.g. a task bar icon and a couple of dialogs, or if its a legacy product that needs to be maintained. But I really wouldn't want to go near it otherwise.

That isn't to say Microsoft are helping because they're not. I've lost count of the number of times they've heralded a new way of app development only to abandon it for another down the road.

I definitely would not use Win32 for apps that require a modern look & feel, or need to work on high DPI displays, or utilize accelerated rendering, or touch / pen, or just have a clean set of widgets with decent layout models. My first preference would be QT but these days even something like Electron would be a good platform.

Re: the black economy

Does Elon love bitcoin for its own sake or because of how the rubes react to his pump and dumpesque tweets?

e.g. a dank meme one day causing the price to surge and then next day saying how bad it might be for the environment causing it to plunge. Someone in his position could easily time his buy & sells to make tens, or even hundreds of millions of profit from that reaction.

Re: Seems like the least reason to dump them

No doubt that's a risk, but if they were smart about it then it needn't work out that way.

Start by finding out what services they use on AWS, why and for how much. There must be egregious & pointless storage and computation going on that they could eliminate straightaway. Of the rest, they could identify the low hanging fruit and move that. The savings would allow them to tackle some of the more complex uses of AWS which I doubt are *that* complex - probably using storage, messaging or similar services.