Posts by Michael Wojcik

the distinction between acronym and initialism originated in the US

And wherever it originated, it's false pedantry. There's no good justification for avoiding the term "acronym" for so-called "initialisms".

Re: All the more reason...

Ah, that's some good kook-rant.

Re: I don’t see how USB-C solves the charger-zoo problem......

Indeed. I'm sure mileage varies, but for all my USB-charging devices¹ I've always just had a couple of those kits that have a cable and a set of adapters for various USB sizes, and the assortment of USB chargers I've accumulated over the years. Phones, tablet, Kindle, that old MP3 player I sometimes dig out for when I'm working on the house - they all charge just fine with whatever cable and charger I use.

I keep a couple of chargers in my computer bag and have various ones scattered around the houses. (The latter stay plugged in; they dissipate negligible heat, which means they're using negligible power.) I've never had any reason to look to see what they're rated for.

¹Refusing to use Apple products has solved the Lightning problem nicely.

Re: The Future of the Deal

I suppose some of his most gullible followers might believe that's a quote manufactured by the deep-state LIEberal elite MSM news, but not enough of them to get him re-elected.

As far as I can tell, for the vast majority of his supporters, it doesn't matter what he may have said. Positions don't matter; policies don't matter; performance doesn't matter.

I've read numerous interviews with Trump supporters over the past few months. These are middle-class and upper-middle-class people, likely voters, likely financial supporters. They're educated, articulate, not perceptibly stupid or ill-informed or insane. And what they say, consistently, is that they'll vote to re-elect the man. Sometimes they'll mention specific achievements (the tax-code changes he signed into law, the stock market, etc); Trump doesn't really deserve much credit for those, but they don't dwell on them anyway. They're excuses. Then they'll use descriptions like "the best president since Reagan" or in some cases "the best president ever".

The real warrant to their arguments, readily apparent, is that they support Trump because he's their team and they want to win the game. US politicians have successfully pushed most of the electorate into treating politics as a sport, and most voters will put up with pretty much anything to support their team. People mocked (and continue to mock) Trump and his supporters since he first entered the 2016 race; and those supporters will be damned before they back down.

And so will the rest of us.

Under a number of models, the European countries and Japan are both part of the continent of Eurasia. Regarding Europe is a continent unto itself has a long history but is by no means uncontroversial. Certainly, those who consider the Americas to be a single continent - a convention widely observed in a number of countries - don't have much justification for calling Europe a separate continent.

Re: "Most-accurate algorithms showed 'little to no bias', so nothing to fear, eh?"

Yes, privacy is a major concern, as are attacks on group behavior. An argument can be made that crowd anonymity is a fundamental human right. I'm reminded of Poe's "The Man of the Crowd".¹

¹I've always wondered if this story is the origin of the term "gumshoe" for a detective. A quick search didn't turn up an earlier use. I'd check the OED but I'm feeling lazy.

Re: The two biggest problems in IT security today ...

90% of the userbase is incapable of wrapping their tiny collective hive mind around the concept of security

Of course. For any topic X of at least moderate complexity, it's likely true that for a sufficiently large population, at least 90% don't understand X - regardless of its relevance to their lives or jobs.

Security researchers have made the point, over and over, that blaming users is unproductive; and that training users, while it can have some benefit, is limited and rarely or never a satisfactory solution in itself.

None of that contradicts what you wrote, of course. It's just to point out that while we have mechanisms for encouraging greater investment (regulation in various forms, possibly with some contribution from market forces, e.g. by coupling security measures to insurance premiums), the human element remains an intractable problem. It can likely only be successfully addressed with a complex of human and technical measures that's customized for different use cases.

Re: and giving users an inferior experience when compared to a native desktop application

Browser-based apps can only be astonishing if you're easily astonished. FTFY.

I've never seen a browser-based application that I'd consider anywhere close to "astonishing". I might allow "mildly impressive". And, yes, I've used Google Docs.

Re: And I quote...

Since there's no absolute frame of reference, and information cannot be transmitted faster than C, for most purposes it makes just as much sense to talk about it in the present tense.

Re: This is an application!

IBM Data Explorer/6000, which began life as IBM Scientific Visualization System, is another example, from circa 1991. It provided a dataflow programming system for data visualization where the user added processing modules to a directed graph. Users could also write their own modules (in the language of their choice), but drag & drop was the main paradigm.

It's an approach that works well in specific domains. I'm much happier seeing scientific visualization done that way than in Excel, for example.

But, yes, for general business application development, this approach is often oversold, and the market seems to already be well-served. Tableau seems to be reasonably successful, for example.

Re: Just another example?

The almighty buck has for a long time dominated decision-making

So what's your solution? Running a university is expensive. US universities rely heavily on non-tenured faculty (fixed-term and part-time) and high-tuition students (foreign and legacy) because they have to pay the bills and state support has plummeted over the past couple of decades. Students who aren't wealthy rely on loans they already can't afford, so they oppose tuition increases.

Nobody really wants to learn - they only want the diploma; nobody really teaches - they just cram folks for exams; exams are increasingly multiple choice, which just tests parrot memory, not understanding.

Sigh. It's easy to lob generalizations. I've been an academic (including a number of stints teaching) and many of my friends and family members are in academia, and I'm calling bullshit on this. Most of the professors and instructors I've known take teaching very seriously indeed, and a majority of the students - undergraduate and graduate - are sincere about learning, for the most part.

Multiple-choice exams may be common in some areas, particularly for recitation classes; it's not feasible to grade several hundred essays in a couple of days. But I can only remember seeing a couple of them while studying for my three degrees (or the fourth that I never finished).

Re: Accountability

The purpose of the USAF is to support Boeing shareholders

It's symbiotic - there's money and power on both sides. That was Eisenhower's point about the military-industrial complex.

Re: An API is not a triviality

The opinion of the Solicitor General is no stronger than any other informed opinion. Plenty of people think an API is trivial, as far as copyright is concerned. And the Solicitor General has some incentive to side with CAFC regardless of legal subtleties.

Also, the SG's opinion is not necessarily the opinion of the DoJ as a whole. It's officially the position of the Federal government for cases before SCOTUS and amicus briefs filed by the DoJ; but the SG is not the only lawyer in the DoJ, or even in charge of the department.

And the appeal to Microsoft's actions is irrelevant, even if your summary of the case and assumption of their motives are correct. They might simply have decided it was more cost-effective to pay Sun.

Re: Confusing.

Yes. This is sometimes known as an "exploit pool collision". There's a good (long) report from RAND from a couple of years ago on 0-days which discusses government 0-day hoarding at length, including disclosure strategies.

The value of an unpublished 0-day drops as more hoarders discover it (or learn about it through leaks, purchase it on the exploit market, etc). Eventually there's more value in getting it fixed.

Re: "...almost-universally panned Windows Vista"

I never had a problem with Vista, personally. But then I was running high-spec development machines, and the first thing I do with a new Windows installation is tweak the hell out of it (Security Policy, Group Policy, UI settings, etc), so I was never bothered by the default settings. I like UAC in maximally-secure mode (prompt for credentials on the secure desktop), for the same reasons that I like sudo on my Linux and UNIX dev machines.

Re: Hypocritical

it turned out that SCO really dodnt have standing to litigate over alleged SCO violations as they didnt have full copyright licensed to them by Novell

The question was actually whether Novell had sold the UNIX copyrights to Caldera, later renamed SCO Group.

In 2007, the court issued a summary judgement saying Novell retained the copyrights. In 2010, the appeals court reversed, stating that "Agreement 2" between Novell and Caldera did not clearly reserve the copyrights to Novell. Later that year, a jury ruled Novell did in fact retain the copyrights.

Subsequently The Attachmate Group bought Novell. They sold a bunch of Novell IP to a holding company controlled by Microsoft, but retained the UNIX copyrights.

Then in 2016 Micro Focus bought Attachmate (well, it was one of those complicated reverse-trust merger whatchacallit things, but to a first approximation...). Currently, according to the latest information I can find, the copyrights are still assigned to Novell, as a division of Micro Focus. Woo!

Of course the UNIX trademark was long ago transferred to The Open Group.

Re: Debatable

Congratulations! You've mastered tu quoque. Now try an actual substantive argument.

Re: So what's the difference ...

Exactly. Teams will record all of this, run speech-to-text (as it does for e.g. conference calls over Teams), and index all of it. Then if you're trying to, say, ask a question in a Teams channel, it will prompt you with rubbish dragged up out of random voice messages.

I can guarantee this is something which will never go on any device I own. And if it ends up on any of my company-owned equipment, I suspect it will routinely fail to work.

Re: We've all been there.

Hire a pilot? Peasant. We keep several on permanent staff.

Re: "most commonly found on cheap handsets"

Problem then is the banking apps stop working and they are so useful

Really? I've never used one, and I've never missed it. What do banking apps do for you?

Re: Give me a chunkier laptop

Oh good, two machines to customize instead of one. Laptop essentially unusable unless I sync it with the desktop before leaving. No thanks.

And since I have two offices, ~1300 miles apart, I'd either have to keep moving that desktop system or have three work machines.

Re: Directors

This falls under state law, not federal. In Delaware, corporations do not have to list officers, and don't even have to list directors until their annual report, which means you get a year to do your dirty work and then close up shop or appoint puppet directors.

Re: @ Warm Braw

Or over Macho Grande.

Re: Kids these days...

Yes, but the Walkman was a rubbish phone.

Re: Riddle me this:

The ways of the downvoters are mysterious. (I admit I found the "sea" analogy unconvincing - what would be making the sea larger, and why would it cause the boats to move further apart? - but that's hardly downvote-worthy.)

There are enough pseudoscience kooks among the regular Reg readership that you may just have been downvoted for failing to mention some alternate cosmological fantasy they cherish.

Re: Does ICANN actually DO anything?

Serve as a cautionary example?

Re: Yes, very interesting ...

Weak anthropic principle: Observing that there is something requires a priori something to observe it. Thus in any world where we can observe whether there is something, there must be something.

Of course there is nothing, too. I have a jar of it right here on my desk. Damn, I just spilled iaskjdff8^*&NO CARRIER