Posts by tekHedd

Re: Decryption Chaff

With the right context a random burst of noise can become *any* message you like. This ultimately is the only thing you can use as protection against brute force...

Re: Fiat money

Funny and true, but really it's more of a "Kleenex" generic term to describe money whose supply is controlled by politics rather than fixed rules than a slur. #shrug

unmaintainable shell scripts

"Linux is hard and I mock you for being good at it."

"Wouldn't rate Oracle better..."

Oracle's push to take control of Java and turn it into a corporate asset was just the inspiration Java developers needed to open it up. Working daily with both Java and ".NET" CLR projects, I would trade all my .NET assets for equivalent Java assets in a second, if I had the option.

"Look it's better now!"

I seem to recall that Dominos ran about a year of advertising that more or less said "Yeah, it was bad. Try it now, we made it better." And, to be fair, they did make it a lot better. But, also to be fair, before the improvements it was more or less inedible.

Re: Gaming

You realize you lost your entire audience at "like a pig," right? This happened before they even knew what your message was. I'll always wonder what the rest of the paragraph says.

Moral Compass

True, corporations are incomprehensible if you try to think of them as people, even though legally they sort of are. :( Another way to look at it is that, in the context of publicly-held corporations, *corporate law* is the only morality. Google isn't an evil corporation--it would be a truly evil human, but in fact it's a very good corporation. "Don't be evil" still applies, it's just that "good" has a different meaning here.

We've created extremely powerful creatures whose only morality is "maximize stockholder value," and "don't get caught when you break the law." Then, we act surprised when they ruin lives, dodge taxes, destroy the environment, treat their own customers badly, and in fact do anything they think they can get away with to maximize stockholder value.

Racism? Bigotry? Only has a moral import in the context of "public opinion," the tax advantages of "woman owned" or the regulatory requirement to do sensitivity training. Etc.

Emacs

Anybody remember the disassociated press program, available as a plugin in emacs? It wrote like this.

Boot consortium

Don't forget Google, archenemy of self-signed certs.

Once we can only boot approved OSs and launch approved apps from the official store, we can prevent "evil" software from viewing "bad" web content (signed certs only!). We and our children will finally be safe. Hooray.

" half a dozen hoops"

Spoken like someone who's never used F-Droid. Android apps are (were) just APKs and run exactly the same no matter where you get them from, except for the signing and google's highly intrusive, battery draining telemetry.

Telemetry!

Telemetry shows that:

- all the features I use daily are unloved

- all of the annoyances I have disabled are popular

- the next version will force the annoyances on me while removing the features I love

- people like icons that are indistinguishable monochrome squares

- I need a beer

Re: In the age of Online Lynch Mobs..

"Everything is political" is the new "turn in your parents." It turns any attempt to defuse a situation into a Kafkaesque catch-22, where the person attempting to turn a discussion back to "anything constructive" becomes the villain.

Re: No...

"The US don't need masses of IP space to be able to retaliate against cyber attacks."

Especially when it's masses of already-well-known address ranges that can be easily matched and blocked. I'm at a loss to see what use that is...

You wouldn't shake a baby...

Not stupidity: negligence. Negligence might as well be malice. If you neglect your baby and it comes to harm, don't expect special treatment just because "it wasn't malice."

In terms of power imbalance the situation is very similar. We are helpless.

Re: Not very accurate

"incredibly insensitive remarks" I think we know where El Reg stands on the issue. Or maybe they're (sensibly) afraid of being denounced for not being _strongly enough_ opposed to Stallman?

"TERF"

I believe the modern term is "jingoism"

"...OHSG loved to repeat himself"

Sometimes, and sometimes in the negative. When all is said and done he has plausible deniability in spades because he's said everything, and nothing.

"challenged"

Your language is out of date: "challenged" implies a limitation. You mean to say "different" don't you?

Relationships

There are two things a relationship can not recover from: abandonment and betrayal.

I wonder if this applies to business relationships as well?

Fire, theater, flawed

You discredit your own cause by using flawed examples like these.

I'm not saying I disagree with the underlying goal of this argument, but the "fire in a crowded theater" example is a terrible one. It's not an example of the free speech issue in any sense, and only survives because people on both sides of the issue are too lazy to think for 5 seconds.

"Cancel Culture"

"Cancel Culture" is... simply a phrase to be avoided because just using the phrase puts you in an instant flame war. It should specifically be avoided when discussing actual deplatforming unless you are deliberately trying to to alienate or troll the very people you are trying to convince.

I mean, I can't believe I'm writing this but...starting to get the idea that some of my friends don't seem to understand that communication starts with words that have an agreed-upon meaning.

ALSA

"ALSA is an ugly carbuncle stuck on the side of the kernel source tree, and its configuration language is nearly incomprehensible -- and mostly undocumented"

IMO, PulseAudio would not have happened (the way it did) if ALSA had been properly documented, maintainable code, because the unfathomable, undocumented style of the ALSA project makes devs run as far away as possible from Linux audio subsystems.

Perhaps the developers didn't want anyone outside their team to understand the system. More charitably, perhaps they were so deeply immersed in the code that they didn't realize exactly how awful it is. I mean, it works great, but... when I wanted to port my windows audio drivers to linux, spent a few hours getting to know the ALSA code, and literally ran away screaming. Literally.

Beware the truly brilliant programmer, because they will write code that nobody else will be able to maintain.

Yes, something _like_ PulseAudio will always be necessary for "happy little user apps," but I believe the byzantine ALSA code has repulsed good developers away from the audio subsystem and left a developer vacuum the shape of PulseAudio. :(

4500 lines of code?

Was thinking the same thing: On the one hand, we have a fairly small program (I have larger throwaway internal utilities) written by at most two or three developers, possibly backed by a somewhat larger deployment testing team. On the other hand, we have... the fingerprint of 1000 developers?

Pull the other one, it has 200 bells on, according to our analysis.

"Luckily"

"Luckily they didn't kill or wound any bystanders..."

He hit his target and no one else. That's not luck, that's "practice."

Re: Well in US

And why bother? With only a handful of companies owning all of the media networks, it would be fairly easy to subvert the information sources without alerting the public, branding any remaining sources of dissent as fake news.

Of course I speak hypothetically here, and certainly do not suggest that this has already happened.

Re: Self host git

And that's just the thing. $4500/mo will pay for an awful lot of DIY.

If only there were some way

"Amazon are continuing to provide their fork under the AL 2.0, so they are benefiting the community by keeping their fork available..."

Gosh yes so kind of them. Nobody else could possibly fork the project and make it available publicly. If only there were some sort of service where you could go to provide a fork of a Git project, perhaps a centralized location or "hub" or perhaps a place where you can continue to merge Git patches like in a science "lab". Gosh I'm so sorry I'm rambling crazy talk now. Such a place would have to provide continuous integration servers, issue tracking, all kinds of stuff, and it'd have to be free. Thank god for Amazon!

Alternatively,..

"If you aren't capable of hosting it elsewhere within a few hours..."

I just want to tell them to go rent some rack space. Doing your own hosting is hard, but it's not *that* hard.

Apathetic bloody website, I've no sympathy at all.