Posts by Christian Berger

Re: Nice to have the choice

Ohh I've done this as a trainee. Then I got a barcode scanner which would not only scan the barcode for you, but also type it in, faster than you can even read it.

Re: That's not why hackers dislike Windows 8

So how much code does it take to read an object of a pipe in power shell? How much code does it take in Pascal, or Fortran, or Cobol?

Then think how much software supports the power shell?

The beauty of the Unix shell is that it is programming language agnostic. I can read the data with scanf in C or readln in Pascal without any extra work. It simply works with the standard input facility in your programming language. Nothing needs to be ported.

Re: Imaginary scenarios

Well actually the pro-Appstore voices were from before we all learned how horribly bad appstores can be. And actually before Microsoft started its massive campaign promoting secure boot as a security feature, nobody even bothered with it. If people wanted it, they would have implemented it years ago. (e.g. via a PCI-card with its own BIOS ROM)

But of course everybody will suspect anti-competitive behavior at Microsoft. That's simply because they have a good track record at it. Ever since Windows 3.x they used technical measures to harm competition in unfair ways. Back then Windows gave you a "nonfatal error message" when you ran Windows under DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS. The list goes on since then. If Microsoft was a "fair" company, nobody would complain.

Actually Microsoft is in the unique position that they could actually advance the field of computing. They have research departments, they have money. They could invent a programming language which helps proving the correctness of code. (or at least certain aspects of that) Instead they ship out bad to mediocre software. The people with ambition are long gone, and todays Windows is pale to what it was supposed to be in the early 1990s when Microsoft got the designer of VMS to design the Windows NT kernel.

The only reason why we didn't get "secure boot" yet...

...was the FUD which was there before. This has caused Microsoft to back away from their original plans 10 years ago to completely lock the BIOS. Now they have the 2 fig leaves of making it possible to turn it off and to issue signatures for Bootloaders.

Now what will happen will be a few Microsoft sponsored security researchers praising "Secure Boot" and/or showing that disabling it creates such "huge" security problems. Then after a year or so Windows 9 will require it to be on at all times. Ohh and of course there will be no foreign signatures since those will be seen as evil.

Re: Several issues

C++ is not really suitable for OOP as such. It implements some strange idea of OOP where messages are implemented by indirect function calls, and there are object copies without garbage collection.

So if you want to do OOP you won't need 99% of the features C++ has. That's why so many people write their own OOP system around C. Gnome did it, Microsoft did it, and probably a lot more people did it, too.

Re: Closed bootloaders - fragmented hardware

Actually it is a problem for Android. That's why only a small part of the mobile phones can be updated to the current version of Android. All the development needs to go through the hardware companies. They adapt Android so it'll run on their devices. Once they have no interest in maintaining support for a particular device, they'll simply drop it. That's one of the biggest problems with Android.

One also must differentiate between 2 markets where mobile phones are being sold to. One, and unfortunately the biggest, are network operators. Those people mostly care about one thing, control. They buy the hardware and "rent" it to the customers, or at least that's how they see it. They want to make sure they are not loosing any business. They want to make sure you cannot run VoIP software on it, or instant messaging. I mean they pay for the hardware, so they decide, seems fair, doesn't it?

The other market, which is still to small, is people simply buying a mobile phone independently of their operator. Thanks to the idea of a SIM-card this is easy enough for even non-technical users. Operators usually don't mind, after all they are not paying for it and trying to enforce only certain devices on their networks means a huge headache for them. In those devices the customer decides, that's why they always had VoIP or Internet radio or instant messaging. One of the early examples is the Nokia N770. Nokia even left out the GSM-Module so the sales-people wouldn't even try to sell it to the operators.

Re: Closed bootloaders - fragmented hardware

Actually mobile operators, at least in Europe, are fairly open to people using any device they want, as long as it doesn't cause any kind of damage or disruption. So you get your SIM, refuse to get hardware from the operator and there you go. There are, as far as I know, already some mobile phones with leaked firmware which can do things its not supposed to do. Again I have not yet heard of any pressure from the operators.

If there's anything, there's more pressure from the hackers towards the operators so they'll finally fix their networks.

The hardware problem might slowly solve itself. Just look at the Raspberry PI. Put that into a proper case and you'll have a proper little device.

Open not only means "published standard"

It also means that this standard is as simple as possible. And that's where office file formats fail.

If you have your data in a spreadsheet, it is unnecessarily hard to get it out again in order to do some data processing with it. It's so hard in fact that starting the application and exporting it to CSV is often considered to be the easiest option.

What we would need is a "grid-based" text editor, which displays structured files as a grid, but then places separators and escape sequences in the file when it is saved. That way we could get people off spreadsheets.

Similar options could be available for letters. Why have a full blown "word processor / crappy layout"-hybrid when all you need is input fields for the address and the text? That way you could also archive outgoing mail a lot easier.

Databases already go into that direction. If you make a dump of an SQL-database, you typically can get text, which you can read easily. They actually have an excuse for not storing it in a standard unixoid structured text file as their format is actually commands you can feed into the database server.

Re: Apple has never done any R&D

Actually no. Apple focuses on one kind of user interfaces, the "panel of buttons" one. They added stopgap solutions to it, so you can still have it, despite of the limitations of mobile devices.

Apple, and to be frank everyone else in the industry, has stopped exploring new ways of making user interfaces. It's a pity that they never moved on beyond the Newton. Apple currently has no offering for users actually working with computers. Unfortunately Apple has even lowered the standards for the industry.

Do what Apple does is making "panel of buttons" interfaces more accessible for "idiots". That wouldn't be bad by itself, if only those "idiots" would stop claiming they are the crown of creation.

Re: The third way

Actually DVB-EPG is far more than "Now and Next". So if you get, for example a VDR with the eepg-plugin you can get get best of both words. DVB-EPG has, depending on the channel and the storage capacity on the receiver, 1-4 weeks.

However I wouldn't use a motorized dish, I'd use a simple multifeed setup with multiple LNBs installed on a single dish. This is much cheaper and works quite nicely.

Re: What I don't understand is why you need a company for that

Well the EPG problem is actually the main problem we in Germany have. There is a VDR-plugin for the Sky/Freesat EPG, but it crashes regularly.

BTW, UK television is, by a large margin, much better than German.

Most Windows software is

After all there was a "goldrush" in the 1990s and everybody was starting Windows projects. So most Windows software packages are designed for Windows 95. If they don't work there, it's usually because the developers experiment with new technologies as they go along. It's not uncommon to find software packages which use just about any technology from VBX components (the predecessor of Active X on win16) to .net, so they require an hour long installation procedure which includes multiple reboots and can break at any of its 30 or so steps. If you are lucky, it's automatic.

The situation is so bad, some people think that installation procedures are normal, although Windows perfectly allows you to just drop the .exe file somewhere and execute it. Monolithic executables are one of the main features of Windows.

Re: To Paraphrase The Ogre

You forgot something.

Security starts with 2 things:

1. Get your developers to understand security.

2. Get your developers to care about security.

I mean in many situations, encryption isn't necessary. Think of railway control systems, all the information is public. The concern is that someone might inject messages. Making sure nobody can inject or alter messages is a totally different problem than encryption.

Then instead of putting a full blown computer somewhere, it can be more sensible to just use a tiny little purpose built machine which will just read a bit of text from a serial line and act upon it.

The main problem is that those systems are usually made by total idiots. Those are the people who write software for PLCs running on Windows and needing an SQL server. Those are the people who invent things like "OPC" OLE for Process Control, an OLE and DCOM based system doing about the same as SNMP, but at a somewhat higher complexity and without proper tools.

The problem is that engineers aren't taught proper computer systems. You can now get a degree in electronics without ever having used a Unix command line.

Re: Which Casino Royale?

Absolutely, and it's also the only one with the iconic "James Bond" theme.