Posts by Rob Carriere

I'm sure that goes on already. The sheer fact that other countries do not (yet) have their Edward Snowdens doesn't mean there isn't anything to report.

Re: Not really

Actually, there's several methods for handling that out there already. Punycode has been mentioned in the comments here, there's idnccd and some more. Alternatively, a browser could have a configuration where it changes the background color behind non-ASCII characters to some configurable color. If you're worried about such attacks, you set that color to bright red or something loud like that and your HSBC will stand out like a sore thumb.

You could make that fully general by allowing assignment of colors to arbitrary Unicode ranges.

Re: Creepy

It's not actually a 100%. If the attack depends on things that changed since XP, it won't work on XP and you can breathe a sigh of relief. If the attack uses features and code common between XP and the later Windows, it will work on XP and the bad guys score.

Yes, that is really freedom. You might want to look up the word in a dictionary.

I'm not suggesting you should become a Marxist --I have no need for Marxists-- but freedom means that others have to the right to disagree or to read the stuff so as to form a reasoned opinion or even to read it because it makes them laugh. Their right, their choice, their time. None of your business.

And, once we're done frothing at the mouth, just how likely do you think it is that papers about astronomical pictures will be 'Marxist screed' anyway?

There have been tides for all those years, just not the liquid water ones that you're thinking of. The Earth's Moon actually stretches the solid Earth, the oceans and the atmosphere. The rock tides are so small you can't see them without instruments, the air tides are also are invisible to the unaided human observer, so we tend to focus on the water tides as 'the tides'. But the other ones are still there.

Similarly for Phobos and Mars. There is no liquid water to make water tides, but there are both rock tides and air tides. And as already shown above, they're actually comparable in size to the ones we have here.

Or in other words, the forces are there and they will do things; the mere absence of liquid water won't make them go away.

Re: Wait

Certainly, but they might not have a non-flamey version lying on the shelf. Different device, likely different shape and so on. So that's the solution you want to work towards, but not an immediate one.

Until then the question becomes, which is the greater risk: the aircraft crashing and rescue being hindered by absence of an ELT, or the aircraft catching fire by the presence of one. Note that on-board fire-fighting kit proved insufficient to the task -- you really don't want this happening in flight. Give the rarity of crashes, reducing the risk of fire is almost certainly the smarter choice.

Re: BULL!

Actually, I have an early '90s book on X11 programming upstairs somewhere and it starts with the expectation of the original X11 team that in two to three years understanding would have advanced to the point where X11 would be outdated. That doesn't sound like they wanted their work to be enshrined as some never-to-be-touched-again ideal. If anything, they're probably disappointed it took so long.

Now maybe Wayland is the better successor, maybe Mir is. I have not studied either in depth, so no opinion. I do find it hard to imagine that the existence of two alternatives can be a bad thing at this point, though.

Re: Who said it was natural?

And they'd be aiming for something, say, the size of a small moon?

Re: Bad idea

"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

-- Scotty

Re: just 'cause

Read silent_count's message again: He never said he was talking about a profit tax. Import duties, for example, would fit his bill.

Now, if you want to argue this runs afoul of all sorts of trade agreements, then you might have a point.

Re: Another technique

The tricky bit is avoiding false positives -- read: pissed-off customers.

Re: Cutting it?

You did bring your lightsaber, right?

Re: But hang on

11 year cycle. Distance between min and max is a half-cycle.

11/2 = 5.5.

2013 ish + 5.5 = 2018 ish

Re: Somebody PLEASE!!!!

For a Photoshop-only situation, that may work. Although, as close as I can figure it out, Gimp is still missing some features that my graphics friends consider indispensable, such as a seamless PDF process.

And Gimp is comparatively mature. Any studio is also going to want Illustrator & InDesign & friends. Good luck finding adequate competition there.

Somebody like me on the other hand, who just needs to occasionally slap a bitmap into submission, I've switched to Gimp years ago and never looked back. So this is going to be a serious case of YMMV, but I suspect the majority of the professional CS users will be stuck like a yacht in the middle of the Sahara.

Re: There is more to Linux than Ubuntu

@Steve Davies 3: So it is, and yes, you caught me skipping subheadings. The flimsy excuse is that my RSS reader seems to encourage that, but it's a flimsy excuse.

I'm still confused as to the relevance of the particular objections given to the article at hand, though.

Re: Email account password probably "very important"

In the sense you mean you always only have a single password. Even if your partner had eidetic memory, that wouldn't stop a crook from using the password reset feature.

Re: Proper backronyms required

Maybe because they already have a REHAB?

Re: Oh FFS

It's a lot worse than that. On a system the size of PayPal's (or even on a system a tenth that size, for that matter), there should be a framework in place that does this stuff for you, will ye or nil ye. The art of programming in the large is making sure that is easier to do things right than to do them wrong.

So either somebody broke out of the framework and this wasn't picked up in QA or there isn't an adequate framework. Either way, they have a structural problem.

You better know exactly at what frequency those alarms operate. A quick scan of the paper says that if the actual frequency is off by 10% from the design frequency of the cloak, the cloak's pretty much useless.

Re: Wot no checksums?

The price of bandwidth doesn't enter into it. The equipment on Mars and on Earth, the distance between the planets and the position of the Sun fix the maximum total bandwidth.

If you really want round-the-Sun radio coverage, you shouldn't be looking at error codes, but at some relay satellites in Earth's orbit around the Sun, but lagging or leading Earth by a significant amount. Then between Earth and the satellites, one should always have line of sight to Mars.

Re: small cells?

@AC15:47: "I just feel sorry for the land-locked population of luxembourg who get many countries to roam with."

Try Baarle-Nassau/Baarle-Hertog one of these days. Half of the town is Dutch, the other half is Belgian. On some roads, you cross the border a dozen times in a couple of hundred meters. Great fun watching your satnav go gaga as it can't keep up with the 'Welcome in ...' messages.

Re: Of the things I'd like to see in the next...

I just checked: It's gnome-system-monitor under Unity. Mostly I do ps auxg | grep commandname and then kill, though; that works under any desktop system, including the 80x24 variety. :-)

Re: Improvement, not perfection.

Sure, better is always possible and better is always good.

The problem with security relying on 'better' is that one single error, made one single time, is enough. Security by Perfect Human is a very dangerous illusion.

Of course, none of that is saying that we shouldn't always try to become better, you're 100% right there.

Re: This should not be a surprise.

Collecting energy by burning straw men is even more efficient.

Exactly where did OP mention coal or oil? He may have meant that, or he may have been referring to solar, or, for all I know, to a secret scheme to build a 150 million km pipe and suck the heat right out of the sun...

Re: Not one to defend Apple but....

Errr, Pet Peeve, that is a vulnerability in sudo. Not a prob in some situations, a serious consideration in others.

Sudo has two advantages over iTunes, though: it's normally used by people who understand the consequences AND the problem is easily mitigated. (close window/lock screen/logout or some such when you go AFK).

You call 'em dumb adults, I call 'em non-specialists who expect things to not have dangerous hidden connections. And right they are.

Re: Open the pod bay doors HAL

Just so long as it is not the iPod bay doors...

Re: Has anyone considered what it *really* takes to go completely malware free?

Actually, the probability that your v1.0 of all that will be bug free is low enough that it would be safe to bet the rent there's a vulnerability there somewhere. Your actual protection stems not from all the mucking about, but from the fact that you created a one-off configuration and nobody can be bothered to crack it.

Re: There's a storm coming-

I'm not going to argue this is going to put MIcrosoft out of business, that would be more than slightly silly. But as for this forked crap you mention, if they get it working properly, I'd be willing to pay premium. Having a single device that can be a phone/tablet and a full-fat computer would be amazingly convenient.

Browsing under a VM isn't a guarantee. There's been far too many break-out vulnerabilities for that to be a trusted setup. Monitoring from a router would be better, as the attack surface of the router can be made much smaller than that of the regular machine. And, nastily enough, there's been root kits that survive an OS reinstall by hiding in the boot memory...

By and large, for most people, I suspect these days you know you're part of a botnet when your ISP calls you and tells you...

Re: It doesn't matter who's right anymore

Actually, it never mattered to start with. Both parties effectively agree that using a model S to drive from New York to Boston is an adventure. That, all by itself, is enough to condemn the vehicle to niche-market status.

Re: Appel one..

Isn't mass-market elitism fun?

Re: I woud rather

You got my upvote, but there's probably a lot of people who opine differently. So maybe sticking a 'Facebook off' switch under advanced search would be less unrealistic to wish for.

Re: Quite impressive in term of size but am I alone in wondering.

@John Smith 19: The SIMD thing _does_ just work. Out of the box, no prob.

It's when you insist that you want every last bit of performance from your hardware that things get difficult. Running a computer at a couple percent efficiency isn't hard and for many situations is plenty good enough. Running your home PC at anything approaching full throttle is an interesting engineering task. Running a million CPU super at efficiency is a serious challenge.

So, it's not that there aren't tools. There are and they do a decent job. But a team of specialists piling on the man-months can do better. So it becomes economics: is the cost of the specialists worth the additional performance? This is really no different from programs like Photoshop containing a few hand-coded pieces of assembly. The compiler is good, but sometimes it's worth it to do better.

Re: New western programming language to stop using Arabic Numerals.

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