Posts by John Savard

Dust Gathering

As a general principle, I am strongly opposed to hosting sites being careless with user data.

However, in this case, as it took a year for anyone to even notice, I'd have to admit they made the correct business decision.

What, no impeachment?

I'm quite surprised the police could just go in and arrest a city's mayor. Surely they would have to wait for the aldermen to impeach him first? Maybe this time, the mayor really was involved in criminal activity, but next time, the police could just arrest a mayor on false charges because they didn't like his politics. The police have to be kept strictly subordinate to the elected representatives of the people.

Power?

"As employees, technologists wield enormous power." Not when any one technologist can break the strike, and many technologists happen to be living in poor countries like India. For that matter, mainland China, a totalitarian dictatorship, has many people who are trained in technical specialties related to computers. So here, I'm afraid, Bruce Schneier is being very unrealistic, and is proposing a solution which won't happen in the real world - which distracts us from what we need to do instead.

Fast moons

Given that Saturn has moons, I fail to see how it could even be possible that "The resulting motion of the probe suggested Saturn’s gravitational field was much higher than expected," except for some value of "much higher" within the limits of accuracy of observations of the orbits of those moons.

If there is a real chance that Oracle may be accused of wrongdoing that it did not commit, then indeed any attempt by the prosecution to seek to win without due regard for the law is very bad, because it could lead to a wrongful conviction. And this happens with prosecutors all the time, apparently. I just wasn't aware that this was one of the cases where this particular concern existed.

But then, even those who aren't nice guys sometimes get accused of crimes they did not commit.

Wording Issue

"To imagine that providing a single email address comprises written parental consent is so laughable it is incredible that Facebook ever dared to suggest otherwise." Otherwise than that it does comprise consent, as it would tend to be read initially, or otherwise than that it is laughable, which would be consistent? I hope you see what I'm getting at: people are more used to reading sentences like "That providing a single email address does not comprise written parental consent is so obvious, it is incredible that Facebook ever dared to suggest otherwise." A is so B, it is C that X suggested... A, or not A, but not A is B or not A is B. So also possible is "That providing a single address comprises written parental consent is so laughable it is incredible that Facebook ever dared to suggest such a thing."

Silly Me

And here I thought that if the EU wouldn't agree to a deal that the British people found acceptable, then whatever the current Prime Minister might prefer, Parliament would ensure there would simply be no withdrawal of Britain from the EU. If necessary, a referendum to confirm this would be held. So this eventuality of a no-deal Brexit - will never happen.

Dropped Words, Changed Meaning

"The additional four molecules have incredibly long complex chemical names to spell out here", and yet, if the names existed to spell out here, why didn't I see them? Perhaps you meant "The additional four molecules have incredibly long complex chemical names [too long] to spell out here"?

Development Platform Availability

Can ARM be trusted for deployment on servers, when there aren't even any ARM development platforms around?

That's a good question to ask. That is a gap in the ecosystem.

But if you've got an ARM cpu that's powerful enough to put in a server, then clearly non-rack-mount motherboards can also be developed for it.

Also, while code written in C is at risk of biting you if run on different hardware, code written in FORTRAN or Pascal... not so much.

So I don't see any problems with making the transition gradually. While x86 has a big lead, and some of its competitors have fallen by the wayside - no one is expecting SPARC or PowerPC or Alpha to come and take the world by storm any longer - I think it's too early to say that the x86 lead is forever.

Georgian

When it comes to real-world Latin alphabet languages, if you're not going with Latin itself, Irish Gaelic is a reasonable choice. Other options include Albanian, Turkish, Basque, and Maltese. But if one really wants a spooky-looking text without going to the effort of inventing a language and its script, nothing can beat Georgian.

Asteroid Mining

Let us hope that someday, thanks to asteroid mining and perhaps self-replicating robots, the day will come when we can all use bars of platinum... as paperweights. Rubber wedges are probably still a more optimal material to use as doorstops.

Advice That's Hard to Follow

Not running code from untrusted sources. Sounds like good advice.

But when I install a program on Windows, I don't get notified, when that program is a DVD player, say, that the program needs to use the SGX feature, so would I please give it permission to do so.

So how do I install programs that I trust to use the computer conventionally, but which have no need to access this feature?

Artifact

I don't know. This model of the shape of Ultima Thule looks to me as if the model may have been formed from an inadequate compensation for artifacts due to the way in which images were scanned interacting with the motion of the New Horizons spacecraft as it passed it.

The Correct Consumer Response

Not only should any sane smartphone user refuse to buy any iPhone, they should also refuse to buy any smartphone with Android that doesn't have removable and replaceable batteries.

Unfortunately, while low-end smartphones still have replaceable batteries, the high-end ones, that cost more, which people would really like to keep for a few years before replacing, almost all have soldered-in batteries these days. So consumers don't have a choice.

One company has a phone with a battery of the non-replaceable type, but allows consumers to buy a battery replacement kit so they can be their own service technician. Nice try, but that is not the solution I had in mind.

Very Strange

I would have thought that the commercial health of the State of Illinois would not be particularly imperilled by companies knowing that, if you want to use fingerprints on a season pass to an amusement park, then you will have to get a parent's or guardian's consent before selling such a pass to a minor. It's not hard to follow the law, and that's what laws are there for. To be obeyed.

That companies ought to be able to plea "Oh, gee, we forgot" in order for a state to be business-friendly is, on the face of it, a preposterous claim that should receive the ridicule it deserves.

Unfortunately, whatever Illinois does, it looks like instead most other states are taking the complaints of some corporations about this very seriously indeed.

Interesting

While such hiring practices are obviously a temptation to the entire industry, I would have thought most companies pay a bit more attention to potential legal consequences.

Of course, outsourcing as much software development as possible to India, on the other hand, is perfectly legal. That's an area where free-market decision making would still rule. But if one wishes to do elements of software development in-house, for better control and security, one does have to pay the price of doing it legally.

Another Factor

Although the floating-point unit was shared between two Bulldozer cores, it was a vector floating-point unit.

Both cores could be simultaneously doing something with a single floating-point number just fine, each one using half of the shared core. It was only when they were using the specialized vector instructions for full-width vectors (the earlier half-width vector instructions would also not conflict) that a conflict would arise.

And, of course, historically, most computers that had hardware floating-point just had instructions that worked on one number at a time. Even MMX only allowed vectors of integers when it first came out, not vectors of floating-point numbers.

Patriotic

I vaguely remembered a news item about some high-priced foreign product which was selling well in China to the very rich as a status symbol, but then the government put it out that buying this product was unpatriotic, and sales tanked because nobody wanted to be seen with it.

I don't, however, remember what the product in question was. Apparently it must not have been Apple, since that's not being cited here.

EDIT: Ah. I remembered another detail, which let me look it up. Turns out the company in question was Dolce & Gabbana, and it wasn't just the Chinese government, they had somewhat put their own foot in it as well.

Evidence? You want evidence?

There is no serious evidence that Huawei presents a threat?

Huawei is physically located in the People's Republic of China. This country doesn't have an independent free press, free elections, and so on and so forth. Thus, being physically located in the People's Republic of China at the present time is evidence of a threat the same way being physically located in Germany during the 1933-1945 period is evidence of a threat. In both cases, the Government may do pretty much anything it likes, and demand anything it wants, from individuals on its territory.

It's too late to close the barn door after the horse has left. One must eleminate all potential threats of a compromise to vital networks and systems. Of course, cell phones and communications equipment from Chinese-branded companies are not the only threat.

Instead, anything (of a computerized nature) manufactured in mainland China, or containing any components from mainland China, is suspect. Which means every brand of cell phone, just about every consumer desktop or laptop that I've heard of. So from now on, we need to get our computer kit manufactured in places like Malaysia and Indonesia if we want relatively low costs. South Korea or Taiwan would be the next tier. Who knows, they might actually start making things in Japan or the United States again.

Chinese Designs

Some homegrown Chinese chips used the MIPS instruction set without a license, and thus couldn't be excported until a company with a license started handling them. This change might be useful there. Next would be the Alpha...

Wondering

Does this mean that Chromium is on a BSD license instead of a GNU license? Or is Microsoft paying money to Alphabet to get a commercial license?

Learned Something New

I thought you guys in the UK had to import your bacon from Denmark! I remember buying some Danish bacon that was available in Canada, and found it just as good or maybe even slightly better than our own product, so if UK bacon is as good as that, it probably stacks up to American bacon as well.

Puzzling

I can only guess that the Labor Party leadership was simply terrified that a terrorist attack might happen in Australia over the Christmas holidays.

Since there is obviously a minority government, or what the opposition Labor Party liked wouldn't have mattered, perhaps when Parliament comes back into session they could just table a bill to repeal this whole mess if amendments aren't forthcoming.

Puzzling

Why on Earth would he risk detection by placing data on the server of a school concerning students who are not at that school?

One would have expected him to do any processing on that data he felt he needed to do for "professional reasons" on his computer at home.