Posts by A J Stiles 2669 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2006
"So bespoke closed source software written by a single developer with *zero* documentation is bad. Closed source commercial software is awkward to use and expensive to support as well. So your POV is both kinds of software are crap?"
"Both kinds" in this case having something in common. Can you spot what it is?
The NHS are big enough to have their own in-house IT department, which could earn part of its keep by being contracted out to customers during slack moments.
Writing software in-house based on existing Open Source solutions also has the advantage that the software can be modified to fit the existing workflow, rather than the other way around.
Training is often mentioned as a cost barrier; but the ugly truth is, much less of it is required than you think. OpenOffice.org doesn't have a different keyboard layout from Microsoft Word, you know! But still, if you did decide to do re-training sessions, you could take the opportunity to teach people to use headings for table-of-contents generation that can survive page insertions, not to use spaces for layout and centring, and not to use a calculator to add up columns of figures in spreadsheets (no, I did not make this up -- I have actually seen all three faults committed in practice, by people who should have known much better).
And well-written software can evolve, so there needn't be upheaval when new features are introduced.
Who the hell *pays* for a freaking terminal emulator?
It should be law that government departments (and anybody else on the taxpayer's shilling) *must* use Open Source software, unless they can prove there is some really compelling reason not to.
I pay my stamp for free medical treatment when I need it. Not to make millionaires richer.
I can quite believe about the "trend" of exposed underwear having started in prisons where clothes fit badly and belts were banned.
About 12 years ago, in the town where I live, a bunch of eco-warriors (naq V jnf bar bs gurz) camped in a public park to prevent it from being turned into a road junction. Some of the local kids took to wearing half-laced army boots in the street, thinking it was a new fashion trend.
What they did not know, and they did not know because they did not bother to ask, was that camp sites tend to be quite muddy places. To avoid tracking dirt into tents, vehicles &c., one removes ones shoes immediately on entering -- that is just etiquette. For brief excursions -- calls of nature, visits to other tents &c. -- which will require imminent de-booting, one does not bother to pull the laces taut, let alone tie them. It is therefore common to see people wearing half-laced boots *around the site*. But for longer walks, one gets shod properly! (Or gets blisters.)
Mine's the ex-German Army one.
"What we need to see is, distros shipping with a larger range of drivers. Also hardware manufacturers need to start to produce drivers for Linux."
The problem is twofold. Firstly, only Open Source drivers can be included in the Linux kernel. A lot of manufacturers like to conceal information about their wireless cards; releasing an Open Source driver would break that secrecy..
Secondly, Microsoft offer incentives to hardware manufacturers *not* to supply Linux drivers or even admit that their products are usable at all with Linux.
For MP3, try
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lame/files/lame/3.98.4/lame-3.98.4.tar.gz/download
For H.264, you can try
svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
You will need a SubVersioN client ..... unless you're using some weirdy browser that has this functionality built in.
Both are licenced under the LGPL, and may be used freely in Open Source projects in countries where software is excluded from the scope of patentability.
Using an untaxed vehicle on the Queen's Highway, except in limited circumstances (travelling less than 10km. from your own land to your own land, or to the post office to obtain a tax disc), is an offence. Keeping an untaxed vehicle on private land with the landowner's consent is *not* in and of itself an offence, and possible related offences -- such as if the vehicle contains substances which make it a pollution hazard -- are beyond the remit of the DVLA.
The SORN system subverts the presumption of innocence, and thus runs counter to Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, implemented in UK law as the Human Rights Act 1998.
Does this mean no need for the binary-only client anymore?
For one thing, not everyone running Linux is running it on x86 (and no, x86_64 does not count as x86). And for another, I don't trust any software for which I haven't seen the Source Code -- especially if it comes from Google.
"There is nothing 'proper' about having to compile an application in order to run it."
Like I said, less with the FUD.
Compiling an application from source is NOT difficult and NOT time-consuming.
It IS, however, the best way to ensure that the application actually does what it is supposed to do: you can be reasonably sure that at least one other person somewhere in the world has had a look "under the bonnet", so to speak, and if they saw anything they didn't like, they'd have made a noise.
If you really cannot be bothered compiling applications from source (and just how difficult is it to spell `make install` anyway?), then at least choose a distribution on the strength of their package repository. (Which basically means Debian or Gentoo.)
"Not to mention that having to compile an application precludes the use of closed-source applications" -- Good, it's *supposed to*. The sooner people start insisting to read the ingredients before they take a bite, the better as far as I'm concerned. The closed source business model has held computing back, and must die.
Go uses the + operator to concatenate strings. That is an instant fail.
It supports freakin' Unicode, for crying out loud. They could have chosen *any* symbol they liked for string concatenation. Yet, they had to pick one that was already in use for something else.
This means you either have to have everything statically typed -- remind me, what century is this again? -- or waste space doing explicit type coercions anytime you wish to add two numbers, lest one of them be mistaken for a string.
There are a lot of things wrong with PHP, but using different operators for different operations can't be said to be one of them.
Best alternative to McAfee?
How about an Operating System where little things like privilege separation and non-executable files are baked in, rather than crude hacks bolted on from the outside.
And a culture where Source Code is passed around, shared and re-used; as opposed to treated as though it were allergic to daylight, with the consequence that everybody is forced to rewrite common functions from scratch, occasionally missing an awkward edge case.
Is it just me who thinks that as far as problems go, shill bidding isn't worth bothering with trying to stop? It's one of the oldest scams in the book, a straightforward appeal to greed. People have been doing it as long as they've been buying and selling stuff.
There's already a built-in disincentive against shill bidding: if one of the vendor's shill accounts wins the goods, then the listing fee -- which goes up with the sale price -- is wasted.
If you don't bid more than you can afford to spend (some would even say "more than you can afford never to see again"), you won't get burned.
Mine's the one with the DVD box set of "The Real Hustle" in the pocket.
Firstly, a Taser fires two prongs into you, so the return is *not* via earth.
Secondly, the earth return from a "one wire" shock is via capacitive coupling from the *whole* body surface, not just the soles of the feet. That's why neon testers work, even when you're up a wooden ladder and wearing boots. And also why children are more likely than adults to survive contact with the live wire of the mains (smaller body surface area means less capacitance means higher reactive impedance means less current flow).
There's an obvious and easy (for some value of easy) fix that would kill the propagation of malware stone dead. That is, make sure no two computers have the same instruction set or addressing schema. Then a binary executable would only ever run on the specific machine for which it was compiled. If it's you who does the compiling, nobody else need ever know how to compile a program for your box. You get to be the final arbiter of what runs on it and what doesn't.
Self-propagating code would have to be written in interpreted languages, and thus could easily be recognised and dealt with.
If you can dynamically change the instruction set and addressing schema, all machines in a corporate setting --and therefore, it is to be hoped, safely behind a firewall -- could be homogenised to allow compile-once, run-anywhere.
If you'd just had a close relative murdered, you probably wouldn't be thinking straight. Your judgement would be too clouded by your own emotions to make rational decisions based on what is right and proper for the whole of society at large.
That is why victims absolutely should not be involved in the justice process.
The measure of a society is how it treats those it values least. So how about this: Every adult should spend some period of time -- let's say 3 months -- in prison, as a sort of rite of passage.
You would be selected at random and placed in a cat. B prison, just like anyone who had committed a crime. Everyone involved -- from the screws to the other inmates -- would be led to believe you were found guilty in a court of law. ("I'm just the work experience kid" would cut no ice. Besides which, all the real criminals would be using it anyway.)
I fully expect those who believe prisons are like holiday camps to be among the first to volunteer to take part in this experiment.
Why not just buy a multi-region DVD player?
On the Continent, where region-locking is considered illegal, they are all multi-region. You'll need a TV that can sync at 50Hz, and possibly a replacement PSU; though modern switched-mode jobbies seem to be able to work OK from 110V. Go in via RGB SCART and bypass the whole PAL / SECAM / NTSC minefield.
Copyright lasts 25 years, or until death, whichever occurs sooner, and is non-transferrable -- except that it can be used one time as collateral for a loan.
An impoverished but talented person can create some content, then borrow money to pay for its publication and distribution. The lender then gets to stipulate how the work can be used, and what royalty is payable for each use, until the loan is repaid in full (which normally would be when the first pressing sells out). At which point, the artist is then free to publish again via the same or other channels. There would need to be a law in place to ensure that the mortgage was not prolonged unnecessarily, so rights would revert to the creator as soon as possible.
No exclusivity: Merely making a copy is no infringement, as long as the appropriate royalty is paid (to the artist, or to the lender if copyright is mortgaged).
There are business opportunities at all levels here: full-package-management services where all the work -- recording, mastering, promotion, distributing, royalties collection -- is done for you; bare-bones services; and everything in between.
Hmm.
The likes of McAfee and ARPU would be royally screwed if there was an operating system out there which included "baked in" privilege separation, files marked as executable or non-executable, and a self-optimising file system where attempting to grow a file trapped between two others just automagically and transparently remapped it somewhere else on the disk, thus ensuring that files never became fragmentated in the first place.
Yes, you *are* being exploited by Huggies (but maybe not quite the way you think).
You have been fooled into thinking that risking getting a little bit of human shit behind your fingernails is more disgusting than 3650* used disposable nappies festering in a landfill site, leaching out poisons for thousands of years, and so spending good money unnecessarily.
* based on 2 years to potty-train at 5 changes a day.
"yes 0% would be better, but it appears there is an appeal / review processes that seems to work to correct those mistakes."
Oh, good. Well, I'm sure that will come as a tremendous relief to the person who had petrol through his letter box because, after failing a job interview on the basis of a false positive, word got out that he was a paedophile.
1. Unix-like file systems understand the concept of non-executable files. Asking a user to chmod a file to make it executable (even in the days when you can chmod a file by right-clicking on an icon and ticking a box) sounds mighty suspicious.
Also, Linux users are taught not to download untrusted binaries. If a package isn't in your distribution's own repository, you download the Source Code and compile it.
2. Windows trojans often convince the user that they are legitimate by mimicking the Windows UI; this behaviour is blindingly obvious when the UI being mimicked is not the machine's native one. One of my co-workers, not particularly tech-savvy (I caught him working on a spreadsheet once -- he was adding up figures with a calculator and typing them into the "total" box) actually spotted some browser-based scareware that way, and correctly reasoned that it was a scam.
More of the social problems (which I don't deny exist) are derived from illegality than from any intrinsic property of the drugs themselves.
* People don't (usually) commit crimes to fund their addictions to alcohol, tobacco or the Internet.
* People only take freebase (crack) cocaine because cocaine is so expensive. It's only expensive because it's illegal.
* People are dissuaded from seeking help at an early stage (when it's most likely to be effective) for fear of the consequences.
* Accidental overdoses from purer product than the user was expecting and poisoning from adulterated product are the results of poor quality control, but there is no incentive for good quality control.
* Electrocutions and fires in cannabis grow-houses are the result of improperly-wired electrical systems, because there is no requirement to adhere to regulations.
* Once you know you are going to be treated as a criminal just for possessing a substance, it's psychologically much easier to commit another crime. ("You may as well hang for a sheep, as for a lamb")
Most of the street price of illegal drugs is spent on working around prohibition; a night's entertainment typically costs pennies to produce, and if this was legal, even heavily taxed, there would be no profit to be made operating outside the law.
I *guarantee* you that if something you consider fairly innocuous (coffee? chips? beer? -- oh, but you already tried that one) was banned tomorrow, then before next Christmas there would be an illegal market exactly parallelling the present illegal drugs market, with equivalent attendant social problems.
The reason that people are still lionising a nearly-40-year-old operating system is *precisely because* it got it so near right the first time. In those 40 years, nobody has managed to make anything better. Which is more probable: you, having learned about something five minutes ago, have seen something that the finest minds in the field have been missing for decades; or you just don't understand it properly?
One tool for one job means sources don't become incomprehensible and binaries don't get bloated.
The "owner / group / world" permissions system is fine-enough grained for people actually to use it.
And ignorance is a temporary state; an obstacle to be overcome. Not something to be celebrated. For crying out loud, *secretaries* at AT&T used to use `vi` for writing letters. When did we become averse to learning?
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