Posts by P. Lee 5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007
Do we want "tight integration" of everything?
No.
Do we want a little button which says "reset to factory defaults"
Yes.
Do we want to be able to open the phone and press a little button which allows a TFTP/USB/Serial Line boot?
Yes. Hey, if you used a light/LED interface, you could just fill a whole room with phones and flash the whole lot in one go.
>Given that the number of women committing adultery is exactly equal to the number of men, this seems unlikely.
That's not very, er, "Modern" of you.
There's also the possibility that there are lots of men trying (and mostly failing) to have an affair, with just a few very promiscuous women.
I have a sneaky suspicion that linking "misogynist" with "griefers" is a mistake. That implies that they have some philosophical basis for their actions - probably not griefers in that case. Either Mumsnet has misunderstood griefers or they rae falling into the trap of saying "if you aren't for us, you're against us" which irritates people.
Haters gonna hate. I think it was a mistake to turn this into "thing."
Or more likely, they get control of their own garden.
They are used to deploying things and being able to remove things at will, so no change there. There's no way MS would mess with them intentionally, though I can see a very well paved road to Hell...
Small end-users are another matter. However I wouldn't be surprised if this was a slightly overzealous legal department rather than a strategy. If they pulled even one of their own pirated games off a PC, they would get slaughtered for it. What *might* be going on is that XBox might become available as a virtualised environment in Windows and in that scenario, they might be a little more aggressive.
>So, it remains to be seen how many people will bother to make, test, and debug container packages for Windows Server as well as for Linux.
It's probably more for commercial providers - "Runs on AWS, also on Azure and your private cloud."
It might also be the way MS deploys services in the future.
It will be interesting to see how the licensing pans out.
That would be, "over-entitled militant lunatic, Sir!
Jokes aside, I'm a big linux fan, but I always have the feeling it's BSD which does things in the proper manner whereas linux just throws things together. I really would love BSD to be huge, more popular, better supported than linux and yet I know it just isn't and won't be.
It makes me a little sad. In many scenarios, we need more secure operating systems more than we need more speed, yet faster is all we hear about.
> If only one in 8 of my calls here in Blighty dropped out on me I would be in heaven.
Ditto in Oz. I have a relative on an Optus-hosted MVNO and anything over five minutes is pretty much doomed to drop. But, hey, cheapskate, we ain't calling you back. I have a sneaky suspicion that its the MVNO indulging in social engineering. People just get used to it and spend less time on the phone, which is fine for them because everyone is on package minutes rather than pay-per-minute.
>That threat should be enough to convince anyone to come off the MS drug, server by server, desktop by desktop.
Herein lies the problem. Whatever you think of their software, MS licensing dept knows what its doing in that its pretty much impossible to link a gradual reduction in use of MS software with increased savings. It's an all-or-nothing affair. With the network effect created by Excel, Sharepoint, Visio and Lync, MS costs are really hard to dislodge.
so, someone saw Dell's plan and thought it was a good idea?
On the mitigation side, I think we're seeing the effects of the GFC & QE. Inflation goes up, salaries are not keeping pace. It's the economic re-adjustment to the volume of debt and losses we've incurred. Rather than let the banks / governments go under, we (the public) are paying their debts by having our income reduced in real terms by inflation. If you accept that the banks are too big to fail, it's pretty much the only politically acceptable way to deal all that bad debt which has been accumulated.
I can see some value in the "too big to fail" argument, but I think that implies we should actually prevent them getting to that size, rather than insuring dodgy business practise. Banking collapse isn't brought on by some nebulous thing out there called "the world economy" its brought on by poor business acumen and practises by banks in assessing risk, and it is encouraged institutionally by knowing that the taxpayer will bail them out when it all goes wrong. If we can't or don't want to break up large financial institutions, perhaps we should have an escalating scale of required reserves as an institution grows. Certainly, that hampers "growth" but it also dampens the effect of a crash. Our problems stem from the depths we sink to in hardship, not failing to reach stratospheric heights during times of plenty; and no, the good times do not make up for the bad. The increasing rich/poor gap demonstrates that trickle-down is barely real. Certainly we need better regulation, but I fear that the corrupting of politics by money means that won't happen. /off-topic-rant
>"A simple fix for this is to not allow browsers to run under admin accounts by default.
True but not the whole story.
You need to block, "run on login" (e.g. skype) from being set by a "normal" user and you need to get people to log off rather than sleep. Then you need to make sure common executables such as Office documents/templates aren't infected. That's before you get into the "is there a buffer overflow in the display system such that using a particular font will get me root access."
The problem is non-trivial, mostly because OS vendors (and I hold those charging for their OS particularly responsible here) haven't really progressed beyond securing a resource beyond the file system and even then its mostly, rwx rather than the ability to filter the data. What we need is the ability to prevent raw sockets being opened and forcing traffic through an OS call. Then you can deny raw sockets but allow access via the OS-provided http request mechanism which does logging, white/blacklist, geo-restriction checking, real-time user confirmation etc. That would put a major crimp in botnet trojan abilities as vendors would have an incentive to provide help to prevent their software being hijacked and there is a easy tie between naughty http connections and the process which made them. If you're worried about privacy, you could have a flag to delete the urls when the application closes, and log the fact that the log has been deleted - the usual auditing stuff.
>And how long before someone makes an app/gizmo that monitors the handshake between PC and bracelet, then fakes the bracelet when you're away?
Basically you need to do full PKI with time data included. If you can crack that and put it in a little dot which you attach to your existing watch strap, it might be usable. It has to be just "unlock" though, not login, otherwise you'll login to every PC you pass. Worse, someone will put a sensor on a wireless device and nick your login while you shake hands. Even then, the "wireless extension" problem means someone could get you to log in while you're away.
I'm still wondering about W10's facial recognition and Google Glass. Can you feed the video data back to a screen in front of a PC and get it to login?
>I support artists but I don't support the middle man who lets be honest, are not really doing anything anymore, they just happen to have cornered the market.
While I despise the fact, the problem is that people buy what they are given. Do you thin 50SoG would have sold anything if there wasn't a carefully crafted media campaign and someone paying to have the book placed front & centre all over the place? All of a sudden, the same words popped up on all media, "everyone is talking about it." Yeah, that's because they've been paid to do so. The middle man is risking a lot, but he's betting that he can out-promote the competition, not that the content of the book or film is any good. It takes a lot of money and organisation to orchestrate those radio stations, billboards and morning tv shows. They didn't need to sell all those copies of books because book production is a small fraction of the cost - the real cost is in the promotion - paying for product placement.
The sad fact is that even a good book won't do that well without cash being splashed on advertising all over the place. Otherwise people get "Masterchef" poked in their eyes from all the billboards. That is what advertising is for, it is to make sure that someone can pay to exclude the competition from mindshare. When was the last time you saw and advert for something where the product had a feature you didn't already know about?
Otherwise you might sit at the railway station or at a website and contemplate what is important in life. No one wants you to do that. At the top of your hamster wheel there is a sign that says "new & more", you just need to reach it.
>That's actually kinda Marxist-proletarian,
That was my first thought, but then Left and Right can be pretty similar in practise, with appeals to the "hard working mums", er, I mean, "enthusiastic agriculturalists and industrious factory workers."
It basically boils down to to labels, but whatever they say, "We the elite are taking control." These days they don't even bother appending "... for your own good."
>Redmond's rules divide the DaaS word into two categories. In the first, a service provider runs “dedicated” infrastructure that delivers DaaS for only one client and is therefore allowed to offer Windows-as-a-service.
What is a "client"? is it a PC, a person or what? And what is "dedicated"?
I'm not sure what the state of Windows licensing is at the moment. If I have a PC in a shared area, various people (I presume) can rock up and log into it, one person at a time, but different people at different times. Can I do that with RDP being the virtual chair?
>Thatcherism is that you sell all the socialist schemes
For all the excesses of Thatcherism, it was inspired by noticing that all the socialist schemes were state owned and had already turned into a giant lame duck. Sometimes a clear-out is the only way to get things back on track.
Sadly the problem isn't really the economic or political model, its the corruption of those in power. Money and power almost always form an unholy alliance.
>Here's a thought though: since the climate is supposedly changing and we're going to be getting longer, hotter summers, that's an awful lot of energy going to waste.
Perhaps if we had more water, we could plant more, er, plants, which would help offset the CO2, instead of crying "drought!" and letting everything turn into a dustbowl.
But as has been said, why would the companies spend millions when they can just order a shortage for free? Plus, if everyone accepts the shortage, you've got a good excuse to raise prices.
I suspect we just have to wait until things get a bit worse, so that it becomes worthwhile for a politician to stand up and say, "Oi, do it or we'll nationalise your sorry assets." Sadly, even then, they'll do it, the taxpayer will stump up for the costs and then it'll be sold off to some chums. Then we'll be back at the point where there's really no economic advantage to having plenty. Companies want scarcity.
You can also blame parents and society in general. IT & video have made the rest of life so exciting, instantly gratifying, passive and emotionally engaging that actually using the pre-frontal cortex for future benefits is both difficult (like an underused muscle) and rather uninteresting.
I've got quite a few friends who are teachers and even those with the best results report that children these days have shorter attention spans than in the past. They then have a choice, do they accept the limitations and try to make the class more exciting, or do they try to retrain the kids? If all the teachers are onboard you can institute the desired culture, but a lone teacher has no chance.
Not that the constant government interference and emphasis on metrics is helping the matter at all.
Your PC might be generating the noise. Co-workers in the same office are likely to all get about the same "password." Or perhaps your phone could generate a very quiet noise and you leave it next to your PC mic.
How about some sort of complex graphic arriving on your phone which you could show to your webcam? A full SMS message which is then OCR'd?
Either way, there is a problem when people keep their phones and laptops together.
Perhaps there is another way. It might just work for managers. Put a small red dot on their foreheads which the webcam could pick up. The exact pattern of the blood spatter.... er... I mean... NFC transponder, could guide the miss... I mean, be detected by the webcam relaying the authentication back to the drone.
Let's ignore maths for the moment.
Pick up a copy "Coral Island" or "The Railway Children" and see what the young 'uns make of it. These are children's books.
Regardless of what you think of the idea that good communication is clear and simple, simply growing up routinely dealing with such complexity is going to stand you in good stead. School is, to a large extent, an academic discipline - its there to help exercise and train your mind to deal with difficult things.
The problem with paying for education is that it skews the subjects towards things which will obviously pay better and forces up the costs to employers, who thought they were getting staff trained for free. If your degree costs 60k you're unlikely to enter a lower-paid field. You may find your smart minds all end up doing law even if they were interested in chemistry simply because the up-front risk is too high.
>The most important assets for bad times are family, friends and community, and a little bit of arable land near fresh water doesn't hurt either.
I was chatting to a friend with family in Greece. She mentioned that everyone was pulling together and eating things they were growing.
So much for increasing income taxes and VAT.
>they would hardly hire someone with which they are in dispute.
True, but the intern-ship offer had already been made and expertise had been demonstrated.
The point of an internship is that the intern learns something and the employer gets cheap labour in return. Friendface seems to not want to do any training, despite the technical aptitude shown.
The correct response should have been, "Oops, our bad. Come here and work with one of our more senior techies to show us how you would would fix the problem."
>Pick any Windows OS of the last 15 years and there are still more current computers running it than Chrome or any flavor of desktop Linux.
It does seem that a chromebook is a laptop with a pathetic-sized SSD.
As for Chrome's failure, that's down to the same reason linux hasn't really taken off. No-one wants to be responsible for the failures involved in the a project as massive as a Windows removal. The potential savings are far outweighed by the potential losses. That isn't to say that Windows is a good thing, merely that extracting it is tricky. Like a fixed-size brain tumour, you have to decide if its worth pulling it out.
When it is finished / polished...
When there are apps...
When games are available..
Then it will be ok - rather like W7 is now... except for the privacy concerns.
There were always going to be problems, but this can't be good news for MS. They should have switched off all the privacy-invading stuff by default on the desktop. Did they really think no-one would notice? If there's one thing which the internet is going to give any new thing, it is pedantic hate.
Few people are impressed by a well done OS these days - where are the *applications* which make you say, "Wow!"? For all Apple's many failings, they do at least try to give you something you might want in terms of usable capabilities. iLife gives you an instant on-ramp to cool stuff a computer can do for you. Maybe there are cool apps that MS has put out, but if there are, there's a major marketing fail, because I haven't heard anything about them and I work in IT.
Where's my freebie 10-user gui-less non-commercial server license for home use, so I can run my home network? Where's the freebie streaming-receiver license for the celeron box under the telly? Without these, people are going to run AppleTV or Linux. A free license for W10 is just like all the other OS's. The fact that MS need to sell licenses to make money is not my problem. GBP120 for a tiny desktop computer and they want how much for an OS?
I almost feel sorry for them. Having grown up being the David to IBM's Goliath they are now a huge lumbering monster themselves. The world changed and they missed it. Their business revenue is safe for a few years but they've managed to make themselves look foolish and really uncool. Even their free license give-away isn't being well received, mostly because they've messed up the marketing and the implementation. It doesn't look generous and they've managed to make themselves look like desperate home-invaders. They are so obsessed with revenue, there seems little joy and beauty in their products. If Apple is run too much by designers, MS is run too much by salesmen, accountants and product-lifecycle engineers. There is no vision for customers. Sometimes I wonder if Apple introduced the flat iphone interface just to lead MS into making an ugly OS GUI. "Hey, let's mess with MS!" They did it for the lolz.
How much horror they could have saved themselves by turning W7 into the last version of Windows ever. "Hey, here's an addon which allows you to run mobile apps sensibly on the desktop." "Hey, here's DirectX12"; "Hey, we've curated some apps we think would be useful for you"; "Hey, here's W7 sp2"; "Look chaps, we'll give you all this stuff for free because, that's the way we are."
That would have been the same give-away, but a better result.
My home router is "end of life" or so Cisco says. And yet, it does ADSL2+ as does my telco. It does all the usual static and dynamic routing. It passes traffic as it always did.
And yet... no more patches will ever be available for it.
Why is this allowed? If ADSL was obsolete, I could understand it, but why are companies allowed to abandon products. Sure Cisco wants to sell me a new one, but I think the mindset of, "its old, it has to be replaced" needs to go. Perhaps if they spent more time refining the software and less time marketing new kit things might be better. The chips in these systems are pretty standard. I can't help but think that incompatibilities are deliberately created to prevent long life and upgrades, just like in tablets and phones.
I like dedicated equipment because it tends to be reliable. Putting an ADSL modem in a server always makes me nervous. I suppose what we really need is a nice little switch/router reference platform from ARM or MIPS running a small *BSD or something like that. The only people I've seen doing such things are quite expensive. Maybe Xiaomi or someone like that could help out?
Because then you can get the answer you want on any issue merely by employing the "correct" polling technique. Electronic (favouring the metropolitan vote) or paper ballot (requiring some level of effort on the voters' behalf and being a little more inclusive).
The problem comes when it demonstrably works well. Then people start demanding that all sorts of things you don't want voted on, get done in this "quick cheap and efficient" manner.
>Aren't these self-same lawmakers supposed to carry out the will of the people...
>Bit of a bind if the poll is a genuine measure of public opinion.
When being a populist pedagogue: "following the will of the people."
When doing something nobody wants: "showing leadership" or "in the interests of national security."
Objective values and principles? Wassat?
>That is why most of the commercial systems, Apple and even DEC, due to the hardware and software coming from the same vendor, install with less hassle.
Hmmm, I just took a look at my wife's mac this morning - some problem with SMB-based favourites in the finder sidebar disappearing if a "locked" item is selected first on power-on/after sleep. If google is anything to go by, that gem appears to go all the way back to snow leopard. The vendor can't be bothered to fix it.
In the W10 case, I'm not buying the "multiple platforms" thing. During the update process, it just needs to read and write files, probably on a single disk. If the OS can't do that, its really time to look elsewhere. Really, for the update process, even after a reboot, you want a minimal system load, so you don't have other design decisions (such as graphics in the kernel) impacting your procedure. To wit, run level 3.
>The researchers say the best way to deal with the attack is for users to not use cloud, not load things people of dubious origin send them and not think technology can solve the problem of ignorance and stupidity.
There, FTFY.
If you rely on changing file names for security, you're doing it wrong. If you've got a trojan executed, its game over no matter what you deploy. As far as Word macros go, doesn't your AV pick that up on file access?
You want to buy imperva kit? How much is your addiction to dumb formats costing you? Not that I'm suggesting that this is an MS-only problem, far from it. However, a culture of focussing on data processing rather than data presentation might make less "sophisticated" formats acceptable.
>Google has to do this, advertising is their only revenue stream,
Possibly more importantly, you rather have an implicit understanding that you are accessing google's servers out on the interwebs. Google is an internet search company and you expect to be sending stuff to them and having them store it not least because that's what you do with google search and you know the phone is a bit small. MS is a bit different. I don't expect my PC to be too small and weak to process data so I don't expect any of it to disappear up to someone's cloud. If I'm looking for a document, on my PC, why would I need to search the internet? At worst, I might search my internet history, if that is cached locally.
Everyone wants to become an indispensable service and tie users into their stack. I'm not onboard with that. I don't want to have all my stuff silo'd because MS won't play with Apple and Apple won't play with Google. I don't need "cloud scale" to do cloud, I just need a little bit of storage for my data, a network link and an old core2duo desktop which is quite happy running 24/7. I have Linux on the desktop and server, but my main problem is that I'm out of options for mobile devices. I just unplug. An old iphone 3g: total data usage rarely moves above 50mb/month. Newer ithingies are busy pushing all the data access into the application layer to feed Apple's cloud. When I had android, Google would at least permit me to install firefox and every now and then I would do a bulk copy of audo via usb. Books come from my home server (thanks calibre). In rare agreement with Orlowski, I thought MS should and would come out as the privacy advocates because they charge for the OS. I doubt the "free" option applies to that many people. Now, however, I don't trust MS any more than I trust Google to do a desktop OS for me. With that trust gone, the last reason I would ever have to buy an MS phone has just flown out the window with it. I'm sticking with Linux for a preference, Windows 7 for MS Office/Visio work and a hated but almost never used freebie windows 8 for the odd "windows only" home requirement.
So now we look for either non-Google Android or something else. It appears something open-source is required because no-one can be trusted not to do something unexpected with my data. At least my time with an iphone 3g means that I can live without the apps. Is it time to bring some of the linux desktop APIs to mobile? QT? Hey Linus, can you have a chat to the chaps about creating some power-efficient kernel ideas? Mozilla, VLC, mplayerHQ, I think we'll need your help. Maybe a sugar-daddy with profits and nothing to lose in the game... IBM?
Probably not just SD810 though that may have compounded the issue.
Mobile has matured quickly - there is no consolidation/virtualisation bandwagon for phones to give them an extra boost of life, they are designed to be dumb and incapable. Mobile and PC markets are fast approaching the same stage: everyone has one, new ones offer no significant benefits over the old ones.
But even smart TV's have inputs. Just hook up a PC to one of them and ignore all the "smart" stuff.
I've gone the other way. Rather than get a large screen and sit back, I get a smaller screen and sit close.
If you have a beef with the license fee, pop a silicon dust tuner in your neighbour's attic and run some ethernet... ;)
Or you can just do without. You'd be amazed what you can get used to and how much people talk, read and play games (which are mostly just an excuse to talk).
and fleecing millions. Yet, that's just theft.
Meanwhile, the Australians are paying for warships to mess with refugees.
Even if it were "illegal," (it isn't), even if those on board were the scum of the earth (statistically probably not), how much might an immigrant cost? How many have been turned back? (633) And how much does it cost to run those warships?
Even if I don't agree with it, I can understand the slavery of the Southern States and the racist philosophy used to justify it. This Australian racism takes it to a whole new level of True Believer. Putting their money where their mouth is, pouring millions of dollars into keeping immigrants (oh the irony) out.
Personally, I'd let them in and ask if anyone knows how to play cricket. ;)
I'm probably bothered less by the downtime than other factors.
Privacy probably isn't an issue - I assume private infrastructure/servers and the MessageLabs stuff will only be external which would be going over SMTP on the interwebs anyway.
However, I'm always a bit concerned at over-centralisation. Over centralisation with a foreign company having tentacles into your infrastructure seems like a bad plan. Really, how hard can it be to run a mail server? Just because you can put everything on a single service, should you? Could you not at least make a show of supporting some British industry - even if all you did was pay them to bring some FLOSS solution up to certified government standards? A dual-vendor policy might be a good idea when MS come knocking suggesting you install W10 & Cortana...
I'm not sure Mark has this right.
>Within a few years, every data centre worth the name will be supported by a complex, powerful and fully configurable SDN.
I know it isn't the same, but how many organisations have a really detailed and comprehensive QoS policy? Why not? It is too hard to track all the apps on the network and quite frankly, it doesn't matter too much. VoIP gets a boost, but often that's on its own hardware too. Its easier to run a couple of gb cables and then we know how much capacity we'll use.
Then there's the SLAs. The number one thing about service is that you don't mess with operational systems, especially if they are high-value to the organisations. Seriously important stuff often gets its own kit - switches, even firewalls, cabling and servers. This is because software/people which/who do lots of different dynamic things are more likely to foul up, be it through user error or simply code complexity. Switches move finite, (almost) fixed size blocks of data, so they tend to be very reliable, running one software instance for months even years. A web browser running flash with lots of dynamic content, not so much, even on a good day.
SDN brings dynamic reconfiguration across the network. Certainly, the actual reconfiguring of kit doesn't actually take long, so SDN does two things: it cuts out that annoying change control and means you don't need those expensive techies to reconfigure kit. That leaves two questions: (1) is your change control serving a useful purpose? and (2) do you have anyone left who actually understands your network when it all goes pear-shaped? There's actually a third question - how do you troubleshoot something which is that dynamic? Do you log every flow?
There is another major issue with the article's premise: the data centre is not the same as a carrier network. Data centres have short distances and very cheap network capacity upgrades. The carriers' problem is that running cable over the wide area is enormously expensive. That is why we still have copper and not fibre everywhere. Its hard for the telco to recoup costs - not the fibre costs, but the fibre laying costs. The fibre itself is possibly cheaper than copper and offers more service capability.
In a data centre I can over-provision and use SDN to allocate the use. I can run fast backups overnight, I can configure up new databases and give them priority over MS updates for W10. I can provision new web-servers and out-allocate connectivity. Actually, I can do all of this without SDN, but that's another issue.
The carrier problem is that the Melbourne to Sydney fibres are running at capacity. Without digging a 900km trench I can't do much to add new capacity. SDN doesn't fix my capacity problems, it just virtualises my configuration targets. If the network is overcommitted, no amount of reconfiguration is going to fix it. I could add new services, but everyone encrypts everything so unless they really trust me and we do an encrypt/decrypt function to allow "the network" to understand the traffic we're pretty much out of luck. Personally, I'd be running VPNs across the carriers' networks as a matter of policy. I don't need them accidentally treating my voice UDP traffic as torrents, thanks.
Really, I don't want a "smart" network. I may want a high-capacity network, but that is different. I want a network which does what I've asked it to do, reliably. Intelligence leads to complexity, and I've already got 99 problems without that.
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