Posts by Vic

Re: Check your facts

> Agoraphobia is not a 'fear of open spaces'.

Yes it is. It comes from the Greek.

"Agora" is a forum, or marketplace, IIRC.

Vic.

Re: has anybody noticed

> pianists have 77 keys for the fingers and three pedals?

Now go and look at a decent church organ.

They have lots of pedals. And you can tell when a convential pianist takes over, because all the bottom end drops away...

Vic.

Re: Transputers

> Ahh, but they were a British invention and so "never existed"

Fair enough.

But the IntellaSys SEAforth is a Merkin chip, and that's multi-cored as well.

Intel do seem to be somewhat behind the times...

Vic.

@AC 20:03

> If I rip a CD I've bought

... Then you're breaking UK law. You are a copyright infringer.

Although the Hargreaves Report recommended the legalisation of format-shifting, it currently remains an offence under CDPA88.

> That's certainly a meaningful difference as far as I can see.

It's not especially meaningful. If the infringer is making a business out of infringement, then it becomes a criminal matter under section 107 - but that doesn't legitimise your infringement, it merely makes the penalties a little different.

> quite a few things are effectively ignored

This is true of many laws.

However, you should not confuse a law being ignored with that action becoming lawful.

Vic.

Re: root

> I let myself be persuaded to give root to a developer

I once had a wonderful argument with a customer.

He owned the box. I commissioned it. He *insisted* on having the root password.

I took the password to the office in a sealed envelope and got them to put it in the fire safe. I told them in no uncertain terms that if I saw a login from any address but mine, there would be no warranty whatsoever, and all repairs would be chargeable at full cost.

Said punter was apoplectic, claiming that he should have the ability to do whatever he liked with his own machine. "You do", I replied, "but I'm not responsible for picking up the pieces". The rest of the staff generally decided to stick to my recommended way of working, and the root password has still not been touched.

...Which is good. A few weeks after this bust-up, I installed Mediawiki for them. The same guy had another fit when I refused, without written authorisation, to configure it to allow PHP script on the pages to be executed... :-)

Vic.

The terminally useless...

> Next to estate agents, accident claim managers, bankers and who else...?

Isn't it about time we built the B-Ark?

Vic.

@Gumby...

> No, its not a big if.

Yes it is.

Oracle have made a number of allegations. they have not yet proven them. they need to do so in order to obtain the win that you are already granting.

> You're right that I haven't been following the case.

That much is *very* clear.

> Last time I checked, Oracle still had a lot on the table

Check again. Judge Alsup *destroyed* their raft of claims. He is not playing their game.

> the actual trial hasn't started.

Motions have been filed. Orders have been made.

If you're not keeping yup to datye with what's going on, you might like to reconsider holding forth about what is happening...

> We won't see or know all of the evidence collected or presented.

We see the orders, subject to any redaction the Court might require. That's sufficient to know that Oracle's case is significantly reduced compared to what it was a few weeks ago.

> The odds are that if this goes the distance, Oracle will win on some counts.

That's your opinion. You cannot substantiate it. Given the paucity of counts Oracle still has standing, I don't believe it.

> Its a stronger case than SCOs.

That's like claiming something is slightly warmer than absolute zero; wet tissue paper is stronger than SCO's case.

> But hey, what do I know?

I was wondering...

> I'm neither a fan of either company.

No, but you are a serial Android-basher.

> Not so sure you can say the same. :-)

Be sure. I dislike both Google and Oracle. But I dislike Internet pundits like Florian Muller astroturfing even more. And that is why I mentioned him.

Vic.

@Cosmo

> you can then set up wildcard forwarding

Wildcards aren't actually all that great an idea; you end up with an infinite number of valid addresses, some of which will get hit by dictionary attacks.

A better solution, IMO, is to use aliases (/etc/aliases in many cases). This allows you to issue unique addresses that all end up in one box, but anything not explicitly allocated is not live, and mail sent to it will be rejected.

Vic.

Re: How predictible

> I came to the comments section to see people debate if i4i had a real case or not

Well, there's your mistake, then.

i4i had a real case. They prosecuted it, and won. Microsoft had several stabs at appealing that win, and lost every time.

The debate is not about whether or not they had a case - they very clearly did - but about whether or not they *should have* had a case. IMO, they should not - but US law as it currently stands gives them one.

Until the US patent system is sorted out, using the XML markup language[1] to create markup will be patentable. And that is idiotic. But that is the law.

Vic.

Yes, I know. I repeated the ML bit for emphasis.

Re: Well duh

> A few company desktops get infected with a virus and suddenly they lose £££millions?

The problem is that a few desktops get infected, and a PHB suddenly has to find ££millions in his budget to upgrade his defences. He sees that as said infection costing him that much.

In truth, all the infection has done is to identify a pre-existing weakness; the extra cost is what he should have already spent[1] if he'd been doing his job properly in the first place.

But it seems that, in these modern times, prevention is never better than cure :-(

Vic.

[1] The clean-up cost is extra, of course - that's the real cost of the infection, and it's rarely significant compared to the re-work to harden insecure systems somewhat.

@Mahou Saru

> So it is okay to break to law to catch people who _might_ be breaking the law?

That's your decision, nobody else's.

If you break the law, and you get caught, you are likely to face prosecution over your actions.

If you think you are justified in breaking a law to achieve some greater good, you can bring that up in court as a defence.

If the jury agrees with you, you get a "not guilty" verdict. If they don't, you might[1] be sentenced for your unlawful activity.

It really comes down to how convinced you are that your idea of "the greater good" is shared by a jury of your peers...

Vic.

[1] With the CPS, of course, anything could happen...

Ah, but Skype isn't working.

> I've tried using SIP over wobbly connections in far flung places.

As have I.

> The result is very crunchy calls with lots of (silent) dropouts.

Not for me, it isn't.

> Skype, however, has adaptive coding

SIP has the ability to use whichever codecs you want, as long as each endpoint agrees to use it. With transcoding proxies, you can often use whichever codec you ilke.

And you can change mid-call by way of the SIP Reinvite command. Any halfway-decent setup will do this as the error rate increases. One can only guess at why your trials apparently could not do this.

In short - if Skype can get a call through, SIP can get a call through.

Vic.

Re: There is no "I" in team

I once very nearly got sacked, despite already having handed in my notice.

For the umptyeth time, my boss trotted out his favourite platitude: "There is no 'I' in team".

I'd already quit. I didn't care any more. I finally said what I'd been thinking all those months.

"No, but there's a 'U' in 'cunt'"

Vic.

Re: Air flow

> Underwater rebreather incidents have CO2 saturation as causing a rapid

> loss of conciousness,

Loss of consciousness is invariably hypoxia; hypercapnia has to be extreme to cause blackout, and I've no idea how you'd get that sort of concentration short of flushing your loop with neat CO2...

> coupled to a severe headache

Strangely, that symptom - although expected - does not seem to occur very often in diving situations. I don't know why that should be.,

Vic.

Re: quite clever though

> You cannot lock other beasties down in the same way you can lock down a windows system.

Yes you can.

With MAC, you can lock it down as tightly as you want. Indeed, the biggest issue I encounter with SELinux is that my customers think the defaults are too tight.

> you can probably go to EACH tablet and do it individually with app

You'd do it with configuration. If you've already rolled out,m then that does mean going round and changing something on each - but htat's no different to a Windows system where you're trying to introduce policy post-rollout.

And, of course, rolling out Linux systems en masse is easy - a single disk image will support a vast range of hardware with no dibbling. Try that with Windows (e.g. supporting both Intel and AMD processors with the same image).

Vic.

Re: Did you read the patent?

> the code ... needs to be on a network somewhere

[vic@goliath ~] $ ssh hobgoblin

Last login: Thu May 26 14:43:21 2011 from goliath

[vic@hobgoblin ~] $

Telnet, of course, predates this by some considerable length of time, but I don't run telnet...

Vic.

Eh?

> Set up an Ubuntu machine, with 2 or more LAN adaptors

Well, I don't actually use Ubuntu, but setting up multi-homed machines like that is a fairly standard operation for me.

> Unplug one of the LAN cords

OK.

> Now try to ping the machine via the other interface.

OK.

> Often it won't work.

That depends on how you've set it up.

If you have not defined a route to the disconnected interface from the connected one, then the correct operation is not to route those packets - it is a significant failure to create routes spontaneously.

If routing between the interfaces is desired, it is a trivial matter to turn it on.

> (look for "source-based routing")

Source-based routing would be the wrong way to do things in that situation. You're trying to achieve things based on the destination; switching behaviour according to the source would likely be a mistake.

> I can plug and unplug LAN cables on any old Windows box, and the

> remaining interfaces will work as expected.

If you're doing what I think you're doing - expecting a disconnected interface to be pingable through an entirely different interface - then that is very much something I would consider very broken indeed. If Windows does that, then it is faulty.

That Linux does something different from a broken implementation is a Good Thing(tm).

Vic.

Re: can't be bothered

> They have roughly the same price tags

Only if you pay for it.

There are assorted RHEL rebuilds that offer KVM without paying a penny. They work just as well as the RH solution - but you don't get the RH support guys on the end of a phone line.

Vic.

[Disclosure: I rebuild and ship RHEL source to my customers]

Never pity the lawyers

> The lawyers do their best for the clients, even if it is madness

And therein lies the problem.

The lawyers are Officers of the Court. Their first duty is to the law, their second to their clients.

If they are spouting total bollocks, they are deficient in that duty, and risk sanctions. Sadly, such sanctions rarely materialise.

Both the US and the UK legal systems rely entirely on the lawyers not being total lying wankers. And there is a reason why courts sometimes go awry...

Vic.