* Posts by Christian Berger

4850 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2007

GOOGLE GMAIL ATE MY LINUX: Gobbled email enrages Torvalds

Christian Berger

Yes

It may be that Google doesn't even have places where they can take bug reports, and there is a serious reason why Linus might not know people involved in Google Mail.

There seem to be 2 groups of software engineers. The one Linus belongs to is the one trying to solve problems in the most elegant and simplest way. They think that knowing how to solve a problem is the most important part of software design, and a low number of lines of code is one of their top priorities. They know that, when they do a proper job, a small number of orthogonal features can provide a world of use to the user.

The other group puts its emphasis on development processes. They commonly start with hugely complex designs and frameworks designed to solve very general cases, often even much more general than what they want to actually do. The rationale for this is that, hypothetically, you could reuse those components. In reality, this rarely gets done, as they are not as general as the developer thought they would be, and changing them to be more general would mean changing them, which means changing your old projects.

Those two groups rarely talk to each other since their views are so different. Google Mail probably was done by the later group.

It's noteworthy that in the bigger scale of things, the first group is seen as the one that gets things done. UNIX is a typical example of a product of that first group. In contrast the second one seems to be responsible for many projects which try to solve a rather trivial problem in such a complex way, it's hard to maintain the code. Such projects also seem to "never get done" and continuously evolve for years without getting to a point where they are "done".

Pray for AMD

Christian Berger

Shouldn't be understood the wrong way

It would be a shame if PC hardware manufacturers would understand that as wanting to run Android and/or more bloatware on their systems.

Instead AMD could position itself stronger in the professional computing market. They already have the huge advantage of having ECC by default on most CPUs.

The future of PCs is not with Windows, the people still using Windows are either stuck with legacy software requiring legacy hardware, or don't see anything bad with Android.

Mozilla's ‘Great or Dead’ philosophy may save bloated blimp Firefox

Christian Berger

You know how they say...

If you pay and you don't have the source code (or it's to complex), you are the product.

Christian Berger

Re: Agree - don't run scripts without permission. mMatrix and mBlock are good for chrome.

A really bad example for those sites is Patreon. Their login page is severely broken.

Christian Berger

Actually browsers should go a step further and just have local sanitised copies of the typical bloatware javascript. Instead Firefox constantly phones home to Google.

Christian Berger

Unfortunately Mozilla already behaves like a large coorporation

They even implement things none of their user base wants like DRM or binary Javascript.

Firefox is there to make the web a better place, it has done so in the past, but gradually it's becoming part of the problem it self. For example the web would be a lot faster if Firefox had a "same origin policy" for executing Javascript. Sure it would break some badly designed websites, but it would eliminate the need for Noscript and other cludges to get a usable web.

Hacking Team spyware rootkit: Even a new HARD DRIVE wouldn't get rid of it

Christian Berger

Re: So....

Of course not, since the malware is used by people who can simply force the manufacturer to give them the private keys, they can just sign it themselves.

Christian Berger

Re: One should note that Secure Boot won't help in this case

"Hacking team customers were small dictatorships operating under embargo or semi-embargo which could not purchase proper products from the big guys."

You mean like Germany and Belgium?

Christian Berger

One should note that Secure Boot won't help in this case

"Hacking Teams" customers were governments, and those can simply get any firmware image they want signed by the manufacturer or demand the private key from the manufacturer. Secure Boot may protect you from your random commercial malware, but those rarely go through the effort of trying to be persistent.

Plus with Secure Boot you have no way of changing your own firmware, for example into some much simpler version of Coreboot.

India ponders home-baked chips for defence and nuke plants

Christian Berger

This could actually be fairly easy on a country scale

I mean you can divide most tasks into 2 sub tasks. One is the actual work which is important, but usually doesn't take much processing power, the other is the "GUI" or "Media" stuff, which can be either safely encapsulated on a separate computer, or can be accepted as compromised as it neither has access to important data, nor data corruption can achieve anything.

So you probably can have your "work" system running on the equivalent of a 6502 or Z80 made with modern technology, talking via a secure one-way bus to a graphics subsystem displaying state of the art graphics on any random GPU. If you need things like encryption, you can augment your "6502" with a hardware AES module.

If you follow the KISS principle, you can make an actual effort in security, even with small teams. Always remember that Cray had about 2 dozens of employees back when they "mass produced" the Cray-1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtOA1vuoDgQ

Intel's tablet CPU share to DROP: analyst

Christian Berger

Re: Wrong direction

Well there's enough space for an alternative for Android on those devices... it's just that Microsoft doesn't provide it.

Christian Berger

They could have it so easy

Just promote/build PC-like tablets where you can install any operating system you'd like and you'd have a competitive product. There is no market for x86 Android devices, the advantage of the x86 platform always has been that you can get whatever OS you want. You buy an x86 device and can be sure that, since it's nearly 100% documented, you can install whatever operating system you want for the next 10 years.

Intel did have some interesting tablet experiments, but those had proprietary graphic chips inside... which meant that the only advantage of having a x86 tablet was gone and you were limited to a very narrow band of versions of Windows to run on that device.

Microsoft again offers free certification exams to failures

Christian Berger

I'm sorry, but...

... unless you are in a very narrow band of places, isn't having an industry certification, particularly one from Microsoft, proof that you are a failure?

I mean you either understand the basic principles behind a certain technology in order to build up from that to any product in the field in short time, or you specifically do the least amount of work by studying exam question for version Y of product X. Few people take such exams when they already know what they are doing.

Attention dunderheads: Taxpayers are NOT giving businesses £93bn

Christian Berger

Wrong first assumption

We all pay taxes, therefore we all are taxpayers therefore our money is taxpayers money. Assuming that there is a fundamental difference between giving companies money directly or via the government is wrong.

Of course you might say that you have less control about government money as you have to pay taxes. However you also have to pay for licenses for software you'll never use when you buy a new computer. Or you need to pay for DRM, even though that's the first thing you'll get rid of.

Geeksphone closes up shop as founders turn their eyes to wearables

Christian Berger

You cannot win with more of the same

Just bringing out _yet_another_ touch screen phone with an operating system aimed at stupid people won't get you any buyers.

If you want to have a "geek phone" you should listen to geeks and bring out something that suits their needs.

Never mind Samsung, GOOGLE will EAVESDROP as you browse on Chrome

Christian Berger

Logical consequence of overly complex web standards

If web standards were simple, we'd have some actual competition in the web browser field. There would be many free engines and it would be easy to write a browser around them. There wouldn't be the need for a corporation to manage and finance the development. Without such a corporation you'd have true free software which would be developed regardless of the interests of such a corporation. That way we'd have browsers that would value the interests of their users.

Kobo Glo HD vs Amazon Kindle Paperwhite: Which one's best?

Christian Berger

Well from my experience

The main problem with my Kobo mini is that the firmware is annoying. It tries to get you to use their store. I don't want a store connected to my device. I want to get files, for example by buying them DRM-free (which I've done several times already despite of problem 2) or getting them from a free source.

Problem 2 is that it's rather small and really bad at pre-formated files like PDF or plain text.

Mastercard facial recog-ware will unlock your money using SELFIES

Christian Berger

Essentially they don't care about fraudulent transactions

Every fraudulent transaction that isn't found just means more turnover, and the ones that need to be reversed cost virtually no money.

Amazon just wrote a TLS crypto library in only 6,000 lines of C code

Christian Berger

Re: At 1/10 the size of OpenSSL, it should be easier to spot bugs

Yes, though in my experience, people who can write small and readable code are usually experienced and therefore tend to write code with fewer errors.

Christian Berger

I hope this sets a trend

We sure could use a lot of simpler alternatives to many far to complex pieces of software.

Windows 7 and 8.1 market share surge, XP falls behind OS X

Christian Berger

Well as usually those statistics must be taken with a _lot_ of salt

They represents the market shares of those people who don't block Javascript from non-trustworthy sources. This makes it heavily skewed as people running the Windows they got with the machine are more likely to not have Noscript or something similar installed.

Rise of the Machines: ROBOT KILLS MAN at Volkswagen plant

Christian Berger

Re: who wouldn't like to see the footage of that

Actually there was a fictional murder by robot in the obscure movie "Peng! Du bist Tot".

Actually 2, one was by a service robot in what you would call "private Hackerspace" today, the other was in a factory.

Half of Windows Server 2003 fans will miss July's security cut-off

Christian Berger

But surely...

Microsoft is such an esteemed and trustworthy big partner which won't let their valued customer partners stand in the rain. They surely will bring out Windows Server 2003.2. Otherwise they'd just be like any other company and you could have chosen some SuSE Linux back then.

Uber execs charged, will stand trial in France

Christian Berger

wrong assumption

You seem to assume that Uber is about creating a sustainable business. Uber, like virtually all "Bubble 2.0" company strives to blow up a company as quickly as possible while cashing out wages and perhaps be bought by some big company for 23 phantastillions a bit later.

Giant FLYING SPACE ROCKS could KILL US ALL, warns Brian May

Christian Berger

It's not just the doomsday rocks

Look at the Chelyabinsk meteor that went down in Russia. If people knew about it an hour earlier, there could have been warnings. With contingency plans, lots of injuries and damage could have been prevented. Simply opening the windows probably could have prevented them bursting, and walking outside could have allowed thousands of people to watch the spectacle completely unharmed.

A good meteor watch system could turn a big problem into a harmless and fun event.

VPNs are so insecure you might as well wear a KICK ME sign

Christian Berger

VPNs are not designed for privacy

VPNs can be used for lots of things, but privacy is not one of them, particularly not with commercial VPN providers which have to answer to inquiries.

If you want privacy, there's TOR. It's been designed for privacy and even in the worst case is _much_ better than any VPN solution could be in the best case.

Boffins set networking record with marathon 12,000 km fiber data run

Christian Berger

Re: So....how was it really tested?

Fibres are extremely thin, so you can easily have that amount on simple spools. In the OTDR experiment we had at university we had several kilometres of fibre in a rather small case. So we are talking about a room or so, certainly not portable, but you can easily find some space for it in your lab.

Christian Berger

Re: I thought that was already solved...

"The Kerr effect, along with other effects such as Raman Scattering, Stimulated Brillouin Scattering, Phase Mixing, and probably a number of other effects, are what are referred to as non-linear effects and become worse as the launch power increases"

I do understand that, but I thought this would only be relevant in dispersion-less fibres as with dispersion the wave-front constantly changes, thus averaging out all non-linear effects.

Christian Berger

I thought that was already solved...

... by not using dispersion less fibres so the wave-fronts will change as it moves through the fibre and then compensating the dispersion by using a calculated length of negative dispersion fibre.

Or is this something different?

Q: What's black and white and read all over? A: E-reader displays

Christian Berger

Colour is the least of the problems

I have a Kobo mini which was back then at a great price point (40 Euros). The biggest issues with it are that it tries to force you into some services by the manufacturers and that the screen is not very large. Colour is one of those "nice to have" features you can do without. Actually if I had the choice, I'd rather have a laptop with a decent monochrome display than with a colour one. It would probably double the life time of the battery.

The far bigger problem is that there is currently no good market for ebooks. That's because the publishers insist on DRM which means that the market is rather centralized with Adobe and Amazon being nearly the only players. Luckily, particularly for technical books, there's a large DRM-free market where you pay once and get multiple formats.

Why OH WHY did Blighty privatise EVERYTHING?

Christian Berger

"The German government isn't all that good at running Deutsche Bahn"...

You do realize that "Deutsche Bahn" just like "Deutsche Telekom" both are only in part owned by the government and that both companies. Plus since they have been privatised service quality has gone down steadily. Germany used to have one of the most advanced telecommunication networks before the privatisation, now we are trailing behind most eastern European countries.

In Germany both companies are seen as a poster child for privatisation having gone wrong.

Oh and with most German public companies, the only way they still stay competitive is that their competition has declined much more rapidly.

Who wants a classic ThinkPad with whizzy new hardware? Lenovo would just love to know

Christian Berger

They should build more used ones

Since the Thinkpad market mostly consists of used devices, they should probably build more used ones, as they are much cheaper at the same level of functionality.

Christian Berger

Re: vga

a) It's perfectly functional for resolutions greater than what single-link DVI can do (i.e. 1080p60) Except of course when you are using really bad equipment.

b) You wouldn't be able to use that laptop in 99% of all lecture halls or meeting rooms as those are VGA only.

c) There is no disadvantage to having such a connector. It doesn't take up much space

Christian Berger

Appart from what's beeing said

You should also still have a portable series. IBM has shown how to build small yet very good laptops. They had the first laptop which was smaller than the keyboard. 15" and bigger is fine for some uses, but under many circumstances 13" is already rather large.

And nobody f*cking cares about thickness.

Samsung vows to stop knackering Windows Update on your laptops

Christian Berger

That's why we need to split up the market into hard- and software

One group must provide the hardware, including full documentation, and another group must provide the software.

As long as hardware vendors are allowed to put their own software onto those devices, we will always have such problems. And the problem _will_ increase with overcomplex systems like UEFI.

Layoff-happy Capita charges staff to use cutlery in canteens

Christian Berger

Hmm, the logical consequence is...

... that the first people to do will be the people who are the first to get a job elsewhere... which usually are the people who actually know what to do.

So essentially what Capita is doing is to start a program to lower the quality of their services. This may sound bad, but effectively is what outsourcing is all about anyhow.

BTW we are talking about the sort of call-centre job that can be outsourced. Those typically are just data entry jobs. If web developers would be a bit smarter, there would be simple and secure ways to just make the internal interfaces available to the user so there wouldn't be a need for such people.

10 things you need to avoid SNAFUs in your data centre

Christian Berger

At vocational school...

...we had to cable one of the computer rooms at the school (which was rather questionable). Well we pulled in the cable and labelled them in 2 teams, both armed with duct tape. One took a cable and made rings around it. One ring for the first cable they got, two for the second and so on. The other team also took some cables and made little flags on them. One flag for the first cable they got, two for the second and so on.... So you had both ends labelled... just not in a consistent way.

CIA-funded spy data safe Palantir doubles in value in 18 months

Christian Berger

Luckily they have problems getting people to work there

Apparently they have to pay even apprentices $7000 per month to work there.

http://www.silicon.de/41595889/us-praktikanten-verdienen-7000-dollar-im-monat/?PageSpeed=noscript

It kinda seems like the company people would spit at you on the bus for working at.

Vodafone splashes €2 BEEELLLION to kick German TV sideways

Christian Berger

DVB-T is essentially dead in Germany anyhow

You only get a hand full of channels, not even all major public ones. Since you don't get any channels people don't set up their DVB-T equipment... which means that nobody will provide more channels.

This whopping 16-bit computer processor is being built by hand, transistor by transistor

Christian Berger

Cool project, but if you want to have it easy...

As a German engineer, and therefore a rather lazy person, I have to point out that there's a way to make such a computer with _much_ less parts at the expense of speed.

The idea is that you build a bit serial computer. This means that lots of parts will suddenly become a lot simpler. You can still have 16 bit words, but your ALU, for example will just process one bit a time. Your registers become shift registers with a one bit input and a one bit output. All your buses will also have one bit and clock in their values serially.

There's a book describing such a system. I think it's called "Elektronische Rechenmaschinen". I think it describes a 20 bit machine working bit serially. Back in the early days of building computers, reducing the complexity was essential for many teams building a computer. Trading a factor of n in speed for a factor n of complexity seemed a _really_ good idea back then. Particularly since back then as now, computers rarely were fully utilized.

Windows Phone is like religion – it gets people when they are down

Christian Berger

It's an overlapping market

The sort of company that runs an Exchange server kinda was the prime target for Blackberry. And now that Microsoft builds cheaper devices, and Blackberry looking like it's in its last years, people might think that they work just as well or even better for e-mail with Exchange. Not an unreasonable statement to make.

Chrome, Debian Linux, and the secret binary blob download riddle

Christian Berger

Re: We need another rule for free software

Actually we are far from hitting minimum levels. Software even gets bigger without adding important features. A good example for this is SystemD which replaces a series of shell scripts with a complex system of interdependent modules. Last time I've checked, just the SystemD parts alone were 250k lines of code. There are whole unixoid systems which have far less lines than that.

The other problem is that standards become more and more complex. Think of Webassembly which is a binary layer for Javascript code. It doesn't provide any new features, but solely exists to make the standards more complicated. HTTP/2 is yet another example. It's hugely complex and performs even worse on the sort of connection which actually needs good performance.

Christian Berger

We need another rule for free software

Software cannot be truly free if it's to complex. In order to participate in its development, software needs to be as simple as possible.

Christian Berger

"Unless you're reading every line of code how is this any safer than downloading binaries from repositories?"

It's much harder to deliver malware in sourcecode than it is in binary form, as with the source you are much more likely it'll be found.

Of course complexity is the main culprit here. Web standards, and therefore browsers, are just _way_ to complex these days. That means you need way to much code to implement them, making it hard to make truly free software in a sense of software you can participate in easily.

MOUNTAIN of unsold retail PCs piling up in Blighty: Situation 'serious'

Christian Berger

Re: @AC

@Hans 1

"Yet curiously a three year-old second-hand MacBook will easily sell for at least 66% of list price. Fixed that."

Yes, but seriously only a small percentage of MacBooks will live to its 3rd year. The ones which do are probably the ones which were made by Foxcon on a good day.

Don't assume public trusts you, MI5. 'Make a case' for surveillance – Former security chief

Christian Berger

The problem with that obviously is...

... that with all we've learned over the past decades, making a case for surveillance is near impossible without lying.

Look at the UK, it's gotten by far the highest density of surveillance cameras of any industrial nation. Does that reduce crime in any significant way?

If you want security you need to think about it rationally. You'd need to find the measures which work and then implement those. Surveillance has proven to not be effective at this.

If you go down the rational security road you'll probably end up dismantling most of your secret services and put the money you save in education, health and social services. They probably do _way_ more for security than any secret service will ever do.

Besides, it's not the job of secret services to provide security of fight crime. The purpose of secret services is, obviously, secret and usually involves things like checking on the political situation in other countries and perhaps meddling with it in various ways.

Farewell then, Mr Elop: It wasn't actually your fault

Christian Berger

"If Meego had been as slick as it was in the N9 but two or three year earlier, then I'd agree. By 2011 nobody else wanted Meego and Nokia didn't think it could build an ecosystem on its own. The board agreed."

Actually Maemo had _no_ adversisement and even the N9, which was probably one of the worst Maemo/Meego handsets (no keyboard!) outsold all of their Windows handsets at that time.

Sure there's the iPhone/Android/WindowsPhone crowd who just want some "slick" device to display ads on, Maemo cannot complete with that but why should it? There are people who want to actually _do_ something with a mobile device. People who don't want some cut down "smart"-phone, but a mobile computer which in principle can do everything their laptop of desktop can do. Even the N810 was closer to that than all Android/iOS/WindowsPhone devices you can buy today.

JavaScript creator Eich's latest project: KILL JAVASCRIPT

Christian Berger

Probably one of the worst things that could happen to the web

Suddenly you wouldn't be able to simply patch buggy Javascript any more, you'd have to mess around with some opaque binary files.

It will make the web even less free and less reliable and it'll introduce whole new classes of vulnerabilities. Suddenly web apps will have buffer overruns, so one part of a web app will be able to overwrite code from another one by accident. Combine that with the typical idiocy of your mediocre web developer and you've got a recipe for disaster.

Web apps already have Javascript which is way fast enough for everything you should do with it. For the rest you have video tags and other cool stuff.

BOOM! Stephen Elop shuffled out of Microsoft door

Christian Berger

"There's s theory his job was just to stop Nokia launching an Android phone, thus making things easier for Microsoft to launch a mobile OS of their own."

Actually Nokia had 2 operating systems which, compared to Windows Mobile, were perfectly competitive.

One was Symbian, which was held up by its momentum, but clearly at the end of its life.

The other one was Maemo which even today is a serious competitor for people who actually want do _do_ stuff with their mobile devices.

Silicon Valley season closer: Would you like fried servers with that?

Christian Berger

Re: Had to point two big plot mistakes

Well 2 can be explained away. They may have gotten an e-mail which went into the spam folder, or may otherwise have been ignored when they were partying. The episode showed that happening previously.