Posts by Vic

Re: Prior art??

As silly as it may be the Patent office is only there to record and to act as the most basic of filters. The courts decide on the validity of a patent if there is ever a challenge.

That might be how the USPTO sees it (although it shopulnd't!), but the courts take the opposite view: a patent that has been granted by the USPTO is presumed valid, and is not invalidated by the court without a significant amount of work.

This leads us the the disconnected situation we currently have in the US - both the courts and the USPTO believe it is the other's responsibility to decide on the validity of patents, so no-one actually performs the function.

IMO, if the USPTO isn't properly determining whether something is patentable or whether it is covered by prior art, it is nopt doing its job, and is in urgent need of reform. Yeah, like that's going to happen :-(

Vic.

Re: Vinyl-fetish hipsters don't have a point

Anyone else remember being able to hear the CRT scan sound from CRT TVs?

I can still hear it, despite being of an age where I really shouldn't be able to.

Sadly, the rest of my frequency response is pretty much screwed :-(

Vic.

Re: Traffic lights should be *more* vulnerable as the system benefits from central control.

BTW If the claim that signals are set badly deliberately to slow slow down traffic then the idea is b**lcks

As someone who's spent time in and around the Traffic Industry, I can assure you it most certainly is *not* bollocks. Signal and junction design can have many features, and they're not always the ones you think you're getting.

The Bullar Road junction in Southampton was world-famous for many years - engineers could draw it even if they diodn't know which country Southampton is in. It is intended to make it difficult to drive private cars from the (cheaper) East side of the water into the city centre, whilst enabling buses to get through comparatively easily. Then they deregulated the buses and the whole plan went to pot. But at least part of that system has recently been decommissioned.

the UK does not have centrally managed public transport and bus operators set their own timetables

That is true now - but much of the planning was carried out when buses were municipal services prior to privatisation. And then forgotten.

Vic.

Re: Am I remembering wrong..

Didn't I read somewhere that linux shouldn't be used for military purposes where it could be used to kill someone? as part of some sort of ethical clause in the license?

Not somewhere authoritative.

The GPL has an explicit clause (Section 6) to prevent any such field-of-use restrictions:

" You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."

maybe i imagined it

It's one of the memes that pops up with alarming regularity. It has no basis in fact, nor has it ever had.

Vic.

Re: SLAAC is the problem, not the solution

> Sadly, I haven't seen if this is possible on Linux.

Trivially.

ifconfig works in much the same way. You can also add and delete ipv6 addresses on running interfaces.

Making an address permanent can be performed by putting the relevant directives in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX (or similar for other variants). You can set a single address/prefix (with /64 being the default if not specified) with the IPV6ADDR directive, and you can add extra addresses with IPV6ADDR_SECONDARIES .

Vic.

Re: Next Year

> I would happily take part...

As would I.

Many years ago, I lived on a diet of essentially carrots, rice and tomatoes for 18 months. The odd pint of milk here and there helped, but rice was the staple.

It can be done comparatively easily, but the prime motivator for me back then was that I didn't have an option - I was that broke. These days, it would be considerably harder...

Vic.

Re: mixed units

> Grrr. I really really HATE mixed units.

Don't buy tyres, then.

Mine are 205/60R16C. So they're 205mm wide, with the sidewall height being 60% of that, to fit on a 16 inch wheel...

Vic.

Re: "spin and a highly-reflective coating"

> AFAIK you can't hear Staying Alive in space. Just sayin' ..

"In space, no one can hear you cha-cha-cha"

Vic.

Re: Good - the goal is to keep us safe, not prosecutions

But the world is a better place, and the population happier, if the crimes didn't occur in the first place.

Absolutely so.

If only all this snooping had any benficial effect in that respect, instead of just alienating everyone to the extent that they no longer volunteer information to the Authorities...

Vic.

Re: Good IT staff are NOT a commodity

If you are doing the same job as last year, and you can't get paid more money elsewhere (market rate) why should you get a pay rise higher than inflation?

The corollorary to that is that if you don't get a pay rise, you've actually taken a pay cut in real terms.

That's a really quick way to demotivate your staff.

Vic.

Re: Elop is wrong - Microsoft won't sell Android phones

You should read the license carefully

One of us should...

There's a lot of proprietary non GPL software needed to run Linux (think about nVidia drivers...) and not everything needs to be under GPL

Indeed so. But that only has any relevance whatsoever if the code that allegedly infringes Microsoft's patents is in one of those modules that is not covered by GPL.

And if that is so, that's proof positive that Linux does not infringe any of those patents, which puts an end to the FUD.

Vic.

Re: Bad but...

If you are acting as a router and using logging tools like Wireshark you can intercept all network traffic, regardless of whether it is encrypted or not

Well, you can intercept the packets, but they're unintelligible unless you've got the private key...

Vic.

Re: Cue the bus fans complaining...

> I have and I do so that blows your sweeping generalisation out of the water.

A mate of mine raced in EuroBOSS with an old Jordan F1 car. I've been alongside that car when she fired it up, and the sound was *magnificent*.

The race didn't go quite so well, mind...

Vic.

Re: It's the unwritten part of GTD...

So what wikisalted page, has the details and theory of the Zambezei Principle?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5IFkU8zciA

Enjoy :-)

Vic.

Surely any half-decent text editor will do this for you? E.g. Textpad and Notepad+ can both do it.

vi certainly can...

Vic.

Re: Whatever.

> It's just being a curmudgeon for no apparent reason

Have you not met jake before?

Vic.

Re: Windows' Future in the Enterprise

if you have 10,000 or 100,000 machines there's a huge eco-system out there of well managed, well understood and scalable tools to help you herd it all. The Linux world just isn't like that.

Actually, the Linux world *is* like that. Herding large numbers of machines is pretty easy - indeed, you can even use things like AD to do the job, if that's your preference. And there are Free alternatives to boot.

Vic.

Re: Effing Windows

"The attack was “co-ordinated and systematic” with some of the Trojans used designed to self-destruct on discovery, while other malware lay silent for several months before being activated, according to the report."

Would you like to now argue the fact that just because it seems like they are using Windows does not mean that they are using Windows?

*What* ???

I think we need an award for "non sequitur of the week"...

Vic.

Re: WTF generic security software FAIL

Downvote, because you made that assertion without even attempting to demonstrate that you had any kind of knowledge about the question I asked.

And if you'd bothered to follow the threading, you'll see I was not responding to your post, just refuting an unsubstantiated claim from someone else.

I don't like to downvote you, but I'd like to encourage you to do better

I'm not going to downvote you - but you should probably expect some downvotes from someone...

Perhaps you could be encouraged to try better to follow the thread of conversation?

Vic.

Re: Online security and political conflict ..

> Ukraine is a non-issue

I suspect the people of Ukraine might disagree with you...

Vic.

If you specify debug on the kernel command line, you want to debug everything,

Not at all.

If you specify the long-standing command-line parameter to debug the kernel, that's what you're asking for. systemd hijacked that parameter - which predates systemd by some while - to force systemd into debug as well. This is incorrect.

If you want to debug "everything", you need to say so. I wouldn't expect my apache and sendmail processes to go into debug mode just because I've told the kernel to; they would have their own parameters to do such. It is exactly the same with systemd - it should not have hihjacked the kernel parameter.

Imagine you have a problem to boot the system and you do not know where the problem lies, specifying debug on the kernel command line should debug everything

Nope. That means you only have coarse-grained control over your debug; aside from the probability of that becoming intrusive, thereby destroying your debugging attempt anyway, it also makes finding the correct log entry much harder - there is far more chaff.

Now it could be argued that "debug" should now be ignored, with each piece of code having its own flag - so we explicitly use kernel.debug and systemd.debug - but I wouldn't support that; "debug" has been a kernel command-line parameter for a long time, and this change would serve purely to counter to fact that systemd thinks it can re-use that parameter; that;s quite a bit of change to everyone's debugging methods just to sort out one errant coder.

Vic.

> NetBank does not (and did not) use OpenSSL

Assuming than NetBank and Commbank are the same entity...

...how on earth are they serving https from Apache 2.2.3 on Red Hat Linux without using OpenSSL?

VIc.