Posts by Vic 5860 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2007
if I were Microsoft, I would make the MSI installer service an installable/deinstallable package.
If I were Microsoft, I would port dpkg or rpm to Windows, then put apt or yum on top. This would cost them a couple of hours of some junior engineer's time[1], and the rest of the plan then slots into place...
Vic.
[1] The code is readily available, and can be shipped with Windows just so long as MS satisfies the 3(b) promise. It costs zero cash. And porting it really won't be a big deal...
One of the reasons piracy is so popular is the pirated product is superior to the real thing.
This image pretty much sums it up...
Vic.
I think all but the most hardened freetard will accept the piracy reduces sales
You might want to be careful about such assumptions...
Vic.
K5QXE3TJNZTSAIJAK5SSA2DBOZSSAYTFMVXCAZDFORSWG5DFMQQCCICTNB2XIZDPO5XCAYLMNQQHGZLSOZSXE4ZAMFXGIIDUOJQW443GMVZCAY3PNZ2HE33MEB2G6IB2EAZEMM2FGAYTGQJSIFCDQNCC
The Product Key used to install Windows is invalid. Please contact your system administrator or retailer immediately to obtain a valid Product Key.
Vic.
If you can't actually drive ... don't try.
You've not heard of the Dunning–Kruger effect, then?
Vic.
they already can handle much of the every day driving chores we face today
A 6-year old can handle "much[sic] of the every day driving chores we face today". But he couldn't handle all of them - specifically, when the conditions no longer match the model, experience is required.
I for one would like to see rather more demonstration of success in adverse conditions before green-lighting the project...
Vic.
The deceleration alone from a chute would probably break the plane in half
You don't do the deceleration with a single parachute...
This is how an ejector seat works - it initially fires a drogue chute, which holds the line taught and provides a tiny amount of drag. There is a pressure-sensitive device called a barostat, which fires only once the pressure is above a certain level - if the pressure is lower than that, either the seat is too high (making a main deployment hazardous) or is moving too fast. Once the pressure has dropped and a small delay form primary firing has occurred, the barostat opens (amongst other things) the pincer that holds the drogue shackle - allowing the drogue to pull the main chute release.
Vic.
[ Who has spent some time trying to refurbish an ejector seat ]
The same way he would now.
That could only possibly work for a small subsection of the encryption that goes on, then.
Currently, Alice will encrypt a messge with Bob's ublic key, and he will decrypt it with his private key. For Alice to send the decryption key with the message - she would need Bob's private key. That means it's not private any longer.
You encrypt the stream using a session key
So your system can only possibly work in a mechanism whereby a symmetric session key is negotiated between the endpoints. That cuts out the bulk of such messages. It also means that - were one to want to do something nefarious - it would be trivially easy just to send something other than that session key as the purported decryption key - which would only be discovered much later, when the transmission is decrypted by Law Enforcement. Thus it will be a hindrance to people going about their normal lives, but won't touch anyone who is prepared to fake the session key. And if someone's happy to blow up a building, I doubt there'll be much compunction over lying about a decryption key.
TL;DR: your mechanism is, like so many others, entirely useless when it comes to law enforcement, despite requiring significant intrusion into the private lives of innocent people.
Vic.
good old plod knew everything everyone (but only if they were a baddie) knew/thought/wrote/spoke
Actually, Plod *did* know quite a bit.
Information leaks over short distances. When we actually had a community, the Bad Guys often got caught because their friends and neighbours knew what was going on, and disapproved. It wasn't 100% effective, but better than we have now.
But current Law Enforcement personnel no longer try to be part of that community - they are aloof, and even to go near a copper can be hazardous to oneself (since none of us are quite as innocent as we might wish to be[1]). And so Plod's own attitude towards the community is the reason it no longer knows what is going on. The solution is relatively simple, but I suspect it would make Police recruitment rather harder :-(
Vic.
[1] For example, there's no way I'm going to come forward to make a statement about another driver's behavior if to do so would demonstrate that I was speeding. So the cops will have to do their own surveillance - and they'll get neither of us lawbreakers, because they won't settle for the more egregious case; they want both.
I still see no excuse for ignoring good/best practice here on El Reg.
They're using cheapie shared hosting for the site; adding SSL would require a change in the arangement with the hosting provider (rackspace).
I often wonder whether it would be cheaper to do that than to carry on typing messages to try to defend the indefensiblecurrent situation...
Vic.
I'm reasonably sure that the first versions of MS-DOS did offer command-line editing.
I don't remember a version that didn't - although I might simply have forgotten some...
The early stuff used F1-F3; F1 would repeat the next character in the history buffer. F2 and a character would repeat up until the next occurrence of that character (and ISTR you could prefix a number to repeat up until the nth occurrence), and F3 would repeat the whole line.
Vic.
Except that MSDOS was never claimed to be a multi-tasking operating system
But it *nearly* was.
The original design had all task-context data in a swappable chunk - the SDA. By changing the SDA pointer, you changed the context. There was some grief with changing that whilst certain non-thread-safe DOS operations wre ongoing - hence the InDOS flag - but it had clearly been built with multi-tasking in mind.
Sadly, this doesn't ever seem to have been completed (hence the single-tasking nature of what shipped), and each new version seemed to have more and more static data that wasn't in the SDA, leading to lots of work-arounds and side-effects :-(
Vic.
Except you could only pipe into certain commands and IIRC you could only pipe once - you couldn't daisy chain them
In days of yore, piping worked perfectly. You could pipe anything into anything, and use as many pipes as you wanted to. It worked.
Then they brought in long filename support, including spaces in filenames. This inherently broke the pipe system, leading to the situation you describe.
But prior to that, it was all good...
Vic.
A slide rule was the most advanced piece of equipment in my satchel.
I also have one of these, but TBH, my eyesight struggles to cope in all but the best of lighting conditions :-)
Vic.
How do you feel about their driving a car past your house and grabbing your wifi data?
They didn't - because my wifi data is not broadcast to the ether unencrypted.
Google might not have been the purest of the pure in respect of that little debacle, but the "slurp" was only of plaintext broadcast data; they did nothing to break into networks, just listened...
Vic.
they just allowed people to buy x.uk as well as x.co.uk
Does anyone know the formal rules for that?
I have a .org.uk. The .uk is still unregistered, and the .co.uk is registered to a domain squatter. And I want to find out when I can go for the .uk without flagging that up to a squatter with priority rights...
Vic.
I once rewrote 2,651 lines of C as a seven line shell script.
I was working at a place last year, where one of the "developers"[1] decided to replace one of my noddy shell scripts with a piece of Python code.
There was some 30 minutes' work in my script - it was exceptionally simple. He spent 2 months writing his tortuous snake before it was eventually discarded and the rest of the team reverted to my old bash script...
Vic.
[1] I use the term quite wrongly, of course...
so maybe this libdem promise is worth a punt.
I admire your optimism, but from the first page of the paper :-
This paper sets out our ideas for a future Digital Bill of Rights. It is a preliminary proposal only
There doesn't yet appear to be any promise...
Vic.
He has been a thorn in the side of Treasonous May for the duration of the last parliament
I'm really not convinced of that - he voted for a one-day process to push through a law on mass interception and retention of data, voted for that mass interception and retention, and voted against the DRIP Act having a sunset clause in 2014 - i.e. voted for it to be active until 2016.
I'm not convinced that makes him a "thorn in the side" of May. He seems to be siding with her more than I'd like.
Vic.
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