Posts by P. Lee

Re: A crisis in winTel land

Possibly, but the question is, why is flash so privileged that exploiting it is worthwhile?

Sandbox that whole browser process and its children. No network socket access, chrooted disk, read-only disk except for a stub directory/Object storage, http/s access only via a hardened local OS proxy which logs and can filter.

Read-only OS partition? Read-only installed software partitions?

Browsers don't need privileges. Use repo's or execute by default in a sandbox.

Re: Too early to tell.

>The 'Dark' is an explicit statement of ignorance.

And it's a good thing to admit that we don't know what's going on. I think the objection is that the terms "dark matter" and "dark energy" appear to be designed to give the impression that we know more than we do.

If we substitute P (pixie dust) for dark matter and M (magic) for dark energy we haven't actually got to change the equations.

This doesn't change the investigative science but it might redress the balance in the weight we give to scientific pronouncements based these things in the layman's mind.

"Dark matter is stuff we know is there but can't detect with today's instruments" and "sometimes the results don't tally with expectations" sounds like homeopathy with better jargon.

Undefined stuff with undefined effects is not strong science. That doesn't invalidate the idea, but for laymen, a caveat of "Here be dragons" might be more enlightening, even if it does strip the scientists of some of their priestly robes.

Re: Why is everything on the sign-in page in English?

So, do we still believe western media?

Because it tells us what we want to hear.

Re: Cue the pain in 2.0001 years

Maybe the 8tb is the backup for the network.

Re: Bloody 'Ell

>why would one want a Xeon for 4K streaming, pray tell ?

The only reason I can think is to split the a noisy workstation from an ultra-quiet frontend. Two 4k streams speaks to a dual-monitor setup and a fairly good LAN connection.

Re: Coincidence??

>10 times the telemetry?

I doubt it links to Windows. More likely they've disabled 6 cores so they can sell an easily manufactured upgrade later.

Mouth, meet nasty taste.

Interestingly, if arbitrarily multi core systems take off, it leaves scope for popping lots of cheap arm chips in a box.

Re: Latest Drivers do help, somewhat...

Hibernate is fine if you have a low spec machine.

Load it up with ram and it becomes less usable.

As lots of other people have said, several generations of Macs do it just fine and the whole point of a vendor-appliance is that they have supposedly sorted out issues like this.

It's another war story to add to the list of, "we're stuck with MS because of the cost of moving, but we do quite loath them." and with top-end machines like these, it will infect the minds of important people who will assume MS is rubbish in general. That can cost MS in the long-run and its why it is better to hold off releasing a product until it is ready.

Re: Too little too late

>>>Every one I know hates Microsoft software

Perhaps "hates" is over-egging it.

It does, however, remind most people of the 9-to-5 grind. Who wants to take that with them at the weekend?

Another fail of Universal UX.

Re: OK, I'll bite

If I want a digital license, I'll use my mobile phone to take a picture of it.

Re: Will they carry out a similar study ...

>I mean, the Chinese didn't invent this

Yeah, Western governments are much worse

Ooh! 50c!

Re: When electricity was first introduced....

Ah, the joy of cleverly designed terms of reference.

Forget what could/might be done, what are the bulk of gm sales for? Is it pest-resistance or pesticide-resistance?

If you could make un-ripe or over-ripe food look just right, would there be an economic incentive to do that?

If you could make food absorb extra water to grow larger and heavier (but with no additional nutrient value) would you do that? Would that cause malnutrition?

If you could dominate world wheat production like android and iOS dominate smart phones, what would that do for wheat genetics?

Why were Monsanto trying to sell protein-enriched potatoes in India- the land of lentils?

So much money, so much scope for irreversible lethal badness followed by "it isn't our fault. It isn't our job to regulate the industry."

Tobacco was thought to improve health when it was introduced too.

We don't have a world food shortage. We have a lack of desire to help those in need, and gm does nothing to fix that. Putting more power in the hands of large corporations has rarely been a solution to anything. It's neither needed nor desirable.

>1B in nothing if you look at what other western countries throw at R&D we should be outraged at such a small ammount

And we should also ask where the EU got the 1Bn they were going to give us.

Re: Texas

Ban the guns and ban the term "ridesharing" with respect to über. The appear to be a taxi company with a better mobile app than most.

In my mind, if I'm sharing my car, I don't pay someone a fee to do so and then get paid.

I'm all for sharing, but this isn't it.

Re: No way you could 'withdraw' 4 mill from my branch of Lloyds...

>its my money!!

Only once it hits your Russian bank account.

>I wonder if you could get a discount on licence fees for features that are removed...

Er, yes you do.

Enterprise is the least annoying and they have a sliding scale of "annoying vs price."

It seems they are really trying to lose the consumer market. I get that it doesn't make them much direct license revenue, but even if companies accept the MS Store (which I suspect many will do rather than upgrade) there are a lot of techies and other influencers who are just revolted by their attitude.

That is going to cost them in the long run.

Re: Pah

>>"However, in the UK mission-critical banking apps have between 800,000-900,000 lines of code."

>If that is a problem, then just remove the line breaks. As a Perl programmer, I do that all the time.

Perl programmers are the reason the code has a variable number of lines.

Re: did Microsoft kill it's cash cow?

>the equivalent of persistently assigning a drive letter to a NAS share, which in Windows takes about 30s, in Ubuntu would involve plenty of Googling, firing up the good old terminal, editing fstab, ...).

Maybe you should run Suse... ;)

Yast->Network Services->NFS Client

or from the file browser, click on "Network->Samba Shares->(workgroup/domain)->Server->(share)

Admittedly, there is still work to be done. KDE (& probably Gnome) should push their file system configs down to the OS.

Re: Brexit?

>As things stand the European courts can slap down UK surveillance attempts

So you're giving up on making the UK democracy work and hoping someone else will over-rule our democracy.

What happens when they turn against you?

Re: First questions first

I'm not sure "who doesn't filter adverts" is the first question.

The first question is, to what extent should artists be paid when they aren't performing?

A couple of things stood out in the article:

1. there is no natural "right" to "intellectual property." IP is a fiction. Perhaps a useful fiction, but complaining that your monopoly is legally protected enough seems like a bad PR campaign. You might not notice a dip in revenue if youtube disappeared, but quite frankly, if most of the artists disappeared, most people wouldn't notice. Some people would, but you could lose an awful lot before most people noticed. Excludability might be the most "property-like" property of Intellectual Property, but intellectual property isn't property and in the UK at least, we often have public rights of way which (Horror!) trump private ownership.

2. "The all-powerful middleman today is Big Tech. But changing copyright in favour of the little guy takes time, and isn't easy" Would that be the "little guys" like Sony BMG et al? Do we need to strengthen the rights holders like Simon Cowell? How many "little guys" are there who would have made it, if only youtube and the ASCAP/PRS hadn't tragically taken the money that was meant to feed their starving children? If we did what the article suggests, are we just shifting profit from one middleman (big tech) to another (the music label)? Which serves the public good better?

My personal opinion is that it isn't generally the artists' skill which brings success, but the marketing. Certainly, skill is important, but the real money in the media industry comes from taking a cheap product and running a successful marketing campaign. Rinse and repeat. I'm not convinced that the film and music industries, while fun, actually improve the world that much.

Re: Oh, yeah...

>A lot of people here will now start to cry, whinge an moan about how this will impact bussiness, blah blah blah.

"Hey, you didn't pay us for the most expensive version of Windows, so we're going to punish you with annoying and disruptive adverts, and we think that's a valid business model. Here's DaddyHoggy

to explain why this is acceptable. In the meantime, please buy more of our stuff."

Oddly enough, Suse doesn't nag me even though I'm two versions behind, neither does it listen in on my conversations in case I want to use voice control nor does it randomly upload my data to some cloud. It lacks all that functionality without me even having to reconfigure it!

Re: Microsoft

>>The impact of this was seen in distributors’ official sales data compiled by venerable analyst Context, with units falling nine per cent in Q1 versus the same quarter a year ago.

>Netbooks mk II - can't they just whack Mint or Ubuntu on the things this time?

If you can avoid it, you don't want to build your business on someone-else's. They will eventually try to eat your market. That's why HP and IBM and so on do Linux. If Redhat try any funny stuff it is easy to switch and the mere threat of switching pretty much prevents them trying.

Re: Follow the money

>When was the last time you heard of GCHQ or the NSA being short of cash?

Didn't the CIA run drugs to help fund their activities?

Re: Errr

>Nope, but you can buy or sell a gigabyte of storage, or an hour of compute, or a thousand DNS queries. Those things are definitely commodity.

Not really. Yes you can buy "compute" but the key thing about commodities is that they are interchangeable regardless of supplier and they can be traded.

As a business, you can't substitute an hour of compute time from AWS for an hour of Azure compute time - at least probably not easily. Got a TB of storage on Azure? You probably can't swap that out for AWS storage without having some adverse impact on your applications.

Cloud companies like to pretend its all just a lump of generic compute and its a bit like trading iron or coal, but that's just marketing to make you think they aren't locking you in.

Re: Detente for a reason

And the reason is Amazon.

AWS is replacing Win32 at the server end and it ain't running on either Azure or GCloud.

My enemy's enemy....

Re: Just bought 5 4TB drives

Well you could, but why would you pay more to buy more kit to obtain more performance than you can use?

If you have 8 SSD's and it's in a NAS, You'll need 40G links before you start on the expanders.

>>"what non-admin would ever need regsvr32"

>Make sure it's unavailable, then. Job done.

Security comes at various levels. Accidental user breaches, like flash exploits, which should be fairly easy to contain with jails and stub resource areas.

Combating users who are trying to subvert the system is much harder. You can govern the executable flag (e.g. on unix) but we're at a whole new (but possibly required) level of system examination when we are passing data which may turn out to be executable as a script.

I think one of my favoured solutions to this would be, "any system executable that takes a url as a parameter passes it through a system proxy." and its extension, "most applications use http/smb/nfs etc and therefore can use a system proxy rather than being given generic network access." Sadly, these days many a commercial OS itself can hardly be trusted, so that may not be acceptable.

With the proxy (or probably audit facility) we have some enforced auditing and possible control and the system can do the encryption/decryption so you can't sneak dodgy data in - or at least if you do, there is a record of it.

Re: One word: Monopoly

Yup!

When you have that much power, you (should) have the various parts of your business operating at arms length to each other. That means no free-passes by the internet/transmission business to the content side of the business, or vice-versa.

Re: Sex Education

>Pornography, in itself, isn't a public health hazard. Not educating teenagers about the realities of sex is the health hazard.

And there's the, er, rub.

Porn is fake relationships and fake sex, but it isn't just video like other films. It is designed to provoke and link to a very real, very strong physical reaction in the viewer. It is anti-education. It works really (ahem) hard to undermine what might be learnt intellectually about it, by tapping into strong hormonal reactions. As the age of sexual maturity/puberty has dropped, but the age of intellectual maturation has not dropped in sync with it, we have a few years where children become sexually mature before their thought processes have the maturity to deal with it. Why in general do people think that its ok to have sex once puberty hits, but getting married at that age would be foolish?

If you look at most of the motivations listed in the bill the concerns are actually quite valid to one degree or another, and the resolutions basically amount to, "do more research and try to limit its spread if you can." Perhaps the high-usage rates in Utah make it more of an issue there than it is elsewhere.

The commercialisation of sexual satisfaction, where it becomes a transaction with a vendor and a customer with demands which should be fulfilled in order to warrant payment seems to me to be one of the most tragic mindset-outcome, especially as increased availability makes that the norm during formative years. Even if its non-commercial porn, there is a sense of "I go and get/download it and she becomes part of my collection. I like her." The self-centred nature of it works against what makes a stable relationship, which is putting the other person first and yes, the breakdown in the relationships and support networks has health impacts - it is a public health issue. If legislators step aside while commercial interests attack the mindset-glue which holds relationships together, is that a good thing or not?

This is not prohibition, this is just suggesting that maybe we've let commercial pimps have a little too much freedom to put their goods front and centre in society. Maybe we should think about whether the top shelf is a better place for it.

Re: Syntax

Maybe they complied with the law and then issued themselves with a "right to be forgotten" notice.

re: dot and source only work for scripts written in the same language as the shell.

True, but /usr/bin/python or %WINDOWS%/Program Files/python/python.exe isn't exactly hard to guess.

What we want is a jailed browser process by default, and a prohibition on launching any executable (mime/extension recognition?) from disk areas the browser has write access to. I'd settle for a ramdisk with all the executables in it which gets copied and deleted after use. The browser is a high-risk interface - we know that. From a security pov, you should be able to completely compromise it and still not be able to compromise the user's general files, install persistent threats or compromise the system as a whole. i.e. (pun intended) the browser is an app controlled by the OS, not part of the OS. If you want a high-privileged (what we normally get now) browser, that should be a launch-time option, not the default.

This isn't a windows only problem - I want this for linux too. A chroot without all those interpreters (python, bash, cmd.exe, screen saver config, word.exe, excel.exe) would be a good start. The option of a non-kernel (slow but safe) display system would also be good, even if it were a boot-only option.

Linux is free - it is hard to complain about a lack of features. Windows has no excuse.

Re: Victim blaming

The problem is that if you use a service/asset, you should understand what you are using and at very least the T's & C's.

If the football club had a website, someone should have assessed what the cost of the website and/or data going away was and made contingency plans. If something is important to you, make your own plans to preserve it. Worst case, have some USB sticks with a copy of the website on it, or pay a different provider 14.99/month to host a manually replicated site, in case the whole provider goes away.