Posts by P. Lee

>There's about a dozen ways to force immediate replication

I thought that was the issue.

If we have attribute-level replication, why doesn't AD default to pushing password changes out immediately? That is one of the things everyone wants immediately. Why not have different queues (like switch/router queues) for updates which can be on different timers?

>That's why it hasn't undergone any serious revision in ten years, and why it's still basically better than most of the alternatives ...

Maybe, or maybe everyone saw what MS did to Novell and decided that the only winning move was not to play, leading to a lack of competition and stagnation. The really messy part of network administration is the desktop/users space and if MS isn't going to let you play with those, there's not much value left to add.

>AD (and it's integrations) is one of - if not THE - main reason that MS has been able to maintain it's stranglehold over the enterprise

True, but that doesn't mean the directory is a good one. By locking third-parties out of the authentication system, MS ensured that the client-server integration was theirs alone. Given where NDS was, I suspect we would have had a better directory system now had MS integrated with, or licensed, NDS. I would rather have seen MS buy Novell than Skype.

Novell should have gone for *nix harder and focussed on using their directory to manage the deployment of services. They stayed too much in the infrastructure space and let MS take the solution space and then eat the infrastructure as well. Ah, what might have been....

>My device, my rules.

Exactly, but sometimes you can afford to be flexible.

For example, I run Windows in a VM over Linux on my laptop.

It costs me, ahem, nothing to clone that VM and integrate it into a customer's network. As long as I don't bring up two clones simultaneously, it works fine. At the end of a contract, the VM can be wiped or archived.

The basic problem is that to be very secure you have to hobble your business. You are then into a "risk" vs "actual revenue loss / increased cost" situation. Which path you take will depend on what type of employer you are and what kind of data you deal with. Financial call-centres will take one path, infrastructure transformation consultancies will take another.

Re: "If Facebook can control millions of votes [...], is that still democracy?"

>why should it bother Facebook?

Because facebook probably doesn't care about the election result, but if it got caught influencing things, or appearing to influence things, it may lose the goodwill of organisations and people who voted the other way. In a close election, it could annoy half its US users.

Other media isn't (pretending to be) "infrastructure."

Re: Should have happened years ago

>the slow speed of updates because each new build is specific to a specific hardware configuration (so requires the cooporation of original chip manufacturers).

Hence the microkernel? It seems to me that (power) efficiencies are to be had by de-layering the software and having a monolithic system, but that makes updates - especially when there are third-party mods from the telco networks - difficult to impossible.

The reason we don't have microkernels Windows after NT3.51 is that, while they are "the right thing to do" it requires lots of copying of data in and out of the kernel which is slow - and relevant to today - power-inefficient. It was safe, secure, and a performance dog which led to NT4. The interesting point will be if its better than running bytecode. If it is, they may be able to pull off a a switch from virtualisation to microkernel without too much of a hit to the user.

While from a user's POV making the OS secure is moot if the application layers are handing out data to all-comers, Google may have an interest in making sure all the data is funneled through them, rather than crime syndicates. The point about FLOSS is that it accumulates features and can afford to play the long game. Linux could easily end up being a threat to Android.

It will be interesting to see if Google makes a move to secure their OS or if they will rest on their volume of market share.

Re: How?

>We shouldn't be handing over our citizens to a barbarous legal system that has lost the ability to dispense justice.

Which the existence of the plea-bargain system alone, proves. Either the punishment is fit for the crime or it isn't.

It's almost as bad as the "we're going to double the punishment for not wearing a seatbelt because its a public holiday" ploy we have in Oz. What? Is the punishment appropriate or is it not?

>it's entirely possible to hold both points of view since the EU and its member states do

Well, it tells people its all about being a trading block while grabbing State powers.

"You are a vassal state of the EU" would not go down well in most countries which have agreed to join the EU.

"It is all about trade and free movement" implies a single government, but that is politically unacceptable - so we have a farce.

Re: Genuine question

I think the author got carried away. I don't think the issue is that the video content would end up on youtube.

I think the idea which the author opposes is that that Google is allowed to create a web frontend that users might have access to the EPG so that you access your cable channels as if they were youtube channels. In reality the content would be pulled from the content user's have purchased, but it would look like google is providing it.

Or maybe he does mean that the content would be transmitted via google, but that the user's rights to the content would be checked by google and confirmed back to the cableco's - everyone get's paid except that cableco's would find it hard to compete as content providers against youtube.

Either way google could overlay adverts etc (like youtube does) because it controls the frontend.

There are problems. If content is all search-able it is likely that popularity will depend on rankings which might give google a lot of power to mess with things. If interactivity is all via google servers it gets first bite at all the data, including viewing data. What happens if one company sponsors a program's creation and someone else pays google for the adwords?

Personally I find it unlikely people would accept more advertising for content they have paid for, if someone else offering less, though it is quite funny to watch the cableco's wail about vertical integration. I think there are massive problems with with both solutions. I like my TV broadcast, not streamed, but that's just me.

Re: BREXIT??

Its knowing they're foreign that makes them so mad!

The English, the English....

--Flanders & Swan

>Personally I think the world would be a better place if flash died immediately on all platforms.

Well yes, but that only shifts the problem. The real problem is that the OS isn't providing protection from malicious software.

We need that, and we need to be willing to take the performance hit required to do it properly.

1. Text-based security manifests detailing what an application needs, before it installs (or runs, if it isn't "installed" software.).

2 System-based HTTP security proxies, so we can track bad requests.

3. No network/raw sockets without permission/manifest

4. No disk access outside a temporary area unless noted by the manifest and agreed to by the user/admin.

5. Severely restricted system calls for anything not "properly" installed.

6. Multiple application installations / kick-off options for privileged and non-privileged use. That Enterprise App which needs IE can get its privileges. Normal browsing gets almost nothing.

Flash is just an instance of an issue. We should *not* be relying on applications to police access to resources. That is the OS' job.

Don't do the fruitless search for bad software that AV does, set up a framework where the OS can easily manage all software. It is hard, and it may not have instant take-up, and it may take several iterations to get right, but it should be do-able. We don't need a VM, we just need decent permissions management for more than just disk files and it needs to be built in, not retrofitted like EMET.

Re: Despair ; The problem lies not with inferior candidates. It is inferior voters.

The candidates aren't inferior, they just have different objectives from the voters and the parties have worked really hard to create such polarisation and institutional inertia, that apathy is the natural response to two bad candidates, neither of whom would change anything. Which is what those with large purses want.

So people vote for the firework display.

Re: Meh

>How is a company mandating what their computers can and cannot be used for censorship?

BYOD, 4G.

Hmmm, can someone still be sued?

Probably.

The issue isn't really censorship, its "bother, the IT industry has nothing left to sell so we gotta make some snake oil and find a way to flog it." Selling people things they want to in is probably fairly easy. Hence, "A technical solution for X" is an easy sell.

Re: Like, you know, LISP was once considered AI...

Ah yes, the eternal problem, "am I my own brother?"

Re: Bah!

>Well this Ex-pat doesn't believe any of the British comedy shows were improved by allowing the use of formerly forbidden worlds like "shit" or "fuck" into the scripts.

I wish I could upvote this more.

In 90% of cases swearing adds nothing of semantic value - the words are meaningless in their used context which means the user is simply incoherent and unable to express themselves.

In nearly all other cases where the semantics are accurate, the use of crude language is designed to be offensive. Fry's assertion that "I'm offended by that" has no meaning is incorrect. It's a polite way of saying, "Your deliberate offensiveness is an indication of what an obnoxious person you are. I disapprove of such behaviour and would prefer it to be absent." That's a perfectly valid view which deserves to be taken into account. As far as media goes, you can turn it off, but it is equally valid to express your opinion that "I don't think these incoherent / obnoxious expressions are beneficial to society and I would prefer them to not to be promoted / funded." Perhaps like so many in the modern media, he finds disapproval offensive.

There is a tiny percentage of use-cases where the semantics are accurate and the user is illiterate enough to be unable to express themselves otherwise. That's not funny either.

So, illiterate, incoherent or obnoxious - take your pick of reasons, but none of it is a cause for pride. I saw Ricky Gervais' "Politics" show on TV recently. His "Carling" product placement should have been a warning - you'll enjoy this more if you've dulled your reasoning - even the presenter face doing this sober. Not very clever, not very funny and yes, the laughter seemed to be mostly to hide the embarrassment over what was happening on stage. I get that humour is varied, but this was just sad.

Re: More speed!

>more than 1G on a Home/Home Office/Small Buisiness network is usually a complete overkill.

It would be nice to be able to put SSDs in my home server without wasting them.

But yes, that's pretty bursty traffic and not at all critical.

Re: "Better to remain silent..."

Politics is no longer about doing the right thing, its about organising a team which can win the election game.

Right or wrong, smart or stupid doesn't matter - its about who can run the most efficient party machine. Forget what's right or even workable, can I get a "Hoo-rah!"?

We have generations raised on emotion-based theatrical entertainment and we've had years of government, increasingly not in the public interest - there is little correlation between who is voted for and people's livelihoods. After years of seeing public officials lie and play out stupid games and special interest groups pushing esoteric agendas to the forefront of policy, politics is just another absurd sitcom - Ally McBeal, 24, That 70's show and 2.5 Men all rolled together.

Re: Mobile presentation != net neutrality

Ok, I'll bite.

I'll presume for a moment that T-Mobile is actually mobile-only and not "wireless broadband" so the smaller size pics are fine on a small screen. Is that true of tablets too, which might be on mobile internet? I don't know so I'll leave that aside.

For all the stupid name calling of van Schewick, she is absolutely correct. I've seen the same thing here in Oz. (yes, that's a pun on the picture). Optus advertise offer free unlimited music to mobile devices. Hooray! Except that they don't mean what they say in the headlines (shock!). What they actually offer is that streams from some specific companies don't count towards your download quota.

That means that if I buy music streaming from Spotify I can stream all day to my mobile. If I choose a less popular service, say, OzMadeupEthnicMusic.com or my own purchased music sitting on my own home server - that will be costed against my download quota. Van Schewick was right, (if badly phrased), the deal gives preferential treatment to particular commercial interests and that is a net neut issue.

Do I think Spotify paid to be in this joint venture with Optus? Yes. Does it push people away from smaller, less well established companies (or non-Australian companies) and towards Spotify and a couple of other well-entrenched players? Yes it does. Does discouraging traffic which doesn't go to a few possibly-cached corporate destinations benefit Optus and encourage them to keep their download quotas low? Yes. If Optus becomes dependent on Spotify's payments, how long will the other "most favoured" streaming services last? Maybe there will be a joint venture between Optus and Spotify (or Telstra/Foxtel/Presto...)

What we have here are large players paying ISPs for favoured access where the control isn't speed of delivery but overall bandwidth resourcing which would otherwise make the service impractical. What happens, for example, when your data quota is low but MS have given them a backhander to be included in your quota? Most people use skype and are happy, but how does a new p2p video service gain any traction? The ISP/telco's start picking up extra revenue from the application providers who then start charging customers who can't go anywhere else because other video conferencing providers have been effectively locked out. What we also don't want is technical specs used to discriminate. Is everyone using 480p and the ISP says if you are using 475p then you get a free pass, and, oh look, only one service does that!

This is a net neutrality issue where data quotas are quote low. I am, however open to being proven wrong. Give me a proxy through which I can request any video file or stream and it is transcoded on the fly, or the stream is limited to a particular transfer rate, or some standard way I can signal that my data stream is video and I can control the size so it is not counted against my quota.

Yeah, I didn't think so. Its a cute bird, but its still a cuckoo.

>wonder if I can get parking tickets charged concurrently

Nope.

Tickets are revenue, prison is a cost.

Besides, we are keeping the outrageously long prison sentences for those who embarrass the government, not a has-been email provider.

Like those who leak MP's expense details.

Re: Navigation error - core dump blues

Poor chap died of a heart attack after he got the invoice for the license for the device from the Oracle of Antikythera.

Re: Doh!

Except oracle isn't supposed to be run "for the people."

Nevertheless, I name thee, "Hurdy McHurdface,"

And he deserves it. Common sense seems to have lost against the koolaid.

Re: UDP Fear

Whatever Mr J's issues the point does remain valid and not just for mobile.

There's nothing to stop a UDP DOS attack chewing up my download quota. Currently if I get Gigs of inbound SYNs or DNS or NTP there's a good chance I can defend my position with my ISP.

Regardless, it seems everyone is obsessing over ipv6 without looking at this sentence from the article:

>QUIC's big advantage is in real-time apps, and it's faster and more reliable than TCP because it's not dependent on the operating system.

Say WHAT?! Surely that must be a mistatement! Software layering? We've heard of it.

But no, Chrome implements it. Oh great, a network stack implemented at the application level. What could possibly go wrong?

We need more OS involvement in networking not less. I know Google doesn't care about end-point security, but I think the rest of us might. I'd quite like the OS to kill network connections initiated by, for example, Word and Excel. Shouldn't the application be asking the OS for IP protocol 143 or something like that? Is the problem really TCP or poor OS IP stack design? In the end, packets need putting in their correct order, whether than happens in the OS or the application - why not have this as a library function the OS does, rather than putting it in every application?

If we need a TCPv2 stack that's fine, let's make a TCPv2 stack, but don't kick networking session/transport reliability functions up to the application layer.

Re: Downvoted pv panels

>Its only southern UK south facing unshaded locations have any likelihood of generating a fair return now.

Possibly not even that. I understand that in Queensland, Oz, where solar seems makes sense, the power companies put up prices to compensate for the loss of revenue to solar.

Re: Stupid headphone adapter...

>And when you want to plug your snazzy (non-apple) headphones into another non-apple device, you are saying you can do that with the lightning adaptor still attached are you?

If they wanted to ditch the standard audio socket, they should have replaced it with a better standard socket, not proprietary lightning. Maybe USB-C/Thunderbolt3? USB would be fine for headsets - there's a good chance the industry might coalesce around it. Lightning will always be a dongle-thing.

Remember the 80's? Apple used to boast that "everything is built in." Now, everything is dongle-connected. I hate dongles.

This just looks like a headline-grabbing distraction to avoid talking about the lack of significant reasons to buy a new iphone - not that I'm faulting Apple for that. However, a new license-free standard for some things would be nice. A combined fibre/copper comms cable would be good. I'd be happy for Apple to push for a new standard to replace RJ-45 NICs for mobile devices. Can we do "visible light comms" with an optic fibre to keep the costs down? I don't need LR lasers, I'd just like a magsafe network+power cable.

If they wanted to do something really cool, how about using two cameras and processing the image so that when running video chat, you don't look as though you are looking away from the camera when you look at the screen? Surely that's more achievable than an autonomous car.

>Transit is an important source of revenue for isps.

It take it that Telstra and Optus own/rent the intercontinental links and want to force traffic across those (where they get paid) rather than pass data around within a single data centre.

I get that its more cash for them, but when they are the most expensive and engineered to be deliberately worse, there's probably some anti-competitive issue which keeps them on top.

This is exactly the kind of thing net neut tries to avoid - extracting money from data providers rather than consumers. It looks like too much vertical integration between retail, backhaul and Inter-continental businesses.

If your business relies on pushing all traffic over intercontinental links rather than a few feet of fibre in a DC, your business needs to die.

>Its also the mental stress/discomfort from holding two contradictory views at the same time or performing an action that contradicts their views.

>Example: Kiddie fiddler with a conscience; Knows its wrong but still does it anyway.

The result is generally that one of the positions will win out. If you repeatedly acquire KP, eventually, the feeling of it being wrong will go away. If you repeatedly shun KP and destroy it at the first possible opportunity, you'll keep your belief that its wrong and stop acquiring it.

> What's that Skippy?

The marketing department is a fiver year-old with potato, a pen-knife and a pot of paint, who's fallen down a well?

Re: Is TV a right?

>I am not looking for government mandated sharing of IP.

I think the issue is that the cablecos are using DRM not to manage content (which is inconvenient enough) but so they can rent you a box to undo the DRM at a cost far in excess of the cost of the box. It is dishonest.

If you could purchase the STB for something approaching its cost, I doubt there would be a problem.

Re: Political Slant

>The assumption is that the private sector will always be more efficient than any public agency

There is a confusion, which may be deliberate between efficiency of operation and efficiency of capital.

I can run a service into the ground, which may grant me capital efficiencies and senior management bonuses but that doesn't mean the operation of the service is efficient - I may just be able to sidestep the downsides of inefficiencies because customers have no alternatives in the short-term. I may be piling up the costs through massive inefficiencies, but deferring them. Or I may simply not both depreciating assets properly, leaving that problem for other people (perhaps the taxman) to fund after I'm gone.

Efficient service operation usually involves higher costs - regular maintenance, greater redundancy, replacement of functional stock which has manual doors, with new stock with automatic doors, enabling trains to leave on time, enabling better scheduling, reducing staff requirements, etc.

The upshot is, you can't really run any company by just looking at the numbers. You have to love the industry and the company and make balanced choices which may not be the most lucrative for yourself or make you look like the most efficient manager. This goes for public and private sectors.

Re: Solving the wrong problem

Have an upvote to couinter-act the presumably robo-downvote.

OS design is the problem. Windows is also not the only culprit. Until people are willing to swap performance/features for solid security, things won't change.

The OS needs to mediate all resource access, not just disk, ram allocation and CPU. We need finer-grained control over applications that simply, "which user is it running under." That control needs to include declared network/url access, disk access, it needs to be set at install time and vendors need to take the lead in providing secure, not just functional permissions. There is no good reason for flash running in a browser to have access to every file the user owns. Rights should be inherited. Running a PHP interpreter from a browser should mean it gets the browser's rights which may be different from running the same thing from a desktop shell. Along with virtual memory, how about providing each application with virtual disk and a virtual network proxy? The OS filesystem should be read-only. OS and application binaries and configuration should not be co-mingled. Binaries and config should not be co-mingled. Applications should not be running random executables to update themselves - the OS should be checking known repositories for updates.

All this AV stuff is a fudge and a massive performance drain. Has anyone tried measuring the performance hit of AV vs doing OS design right?

>Japan - We want cheap labour and if we don't get cheap labour we will move our factories where we can get cheap labour.

They're whinging about this to a country where labour costs dropped 10% overnight? Ok, I know it rebounded a bit, but I don't think that's it.

>They are acting more and more like the Gestapo but without the nice leather coats and hats.

Are you trying to get el reg onto the fetish-site list?