Posts by Thomas Vestergaard

Transparent Aproval Process

How hard can it be to understand the App Store approval process? It works like this:

1. Develop app

2. Submit app

3. App gets rejected

4. Use the blogosphere to raise a stink

5. App gets approved

So Joel Comm is obviously on the right track. Two pints on says the "ka-ching" button app gets approved before Christmas.

I sincerely apologise for using the b-word. But for once it actually felt justified.

Creds to Steve Frank for the insight in the process.

Re; Jan Hargreaves

There is a big difference between the services of a credit card and a money transfer company - e.g. the reliance on bank accounts and the thereof gained verifiability of credit status and security of payment. Without these measures, the way to ensure a similar security would be by escrow, but for some reason these cheapskates prefer the cheaper and less secure option - because they naturally trust their friend.

Why anyone would trust an online merchant is however beyond me...

@AC: So...

Please don't move your webservers to linux! You are obviously too stupid to manage them any way, and will just end up giving linux a bad name, when you get pwned. Actually, come to think about it - please pull the plug NOW!!! They have probably already been turned into supernodes in some spam bot network!

That Linksys has failed at securing their own program says nothing about the OS underneath!

And another one takes a swing at Java...

@Daniel Palmer. The JVM that is kept running as a of part of the server. Everything with regards to the actually assembly of the response is passivated to cache (when, obviously depends on your caching strategy). For a site with a large number of requests Java is more efficient than PHP by a long shot.

The inertia people experience with Java comes in the first part of a deployment, where heavily used classes still needs to be JIT'ed and translated into native machine code. (This is also why lots of CS students fucks up their performance analysis in Java.)

Non-compelling?

"Some carriers are citing a non-compelling product"

Non-compelling to who? The carriers or the consumers? Because it seems to me, that the carriers tend to be completely out of touch with what the consumers are interested in - probably more by choice than by incompetence though.

iFan because Apple didn't give a toss about what the networks wanted...

Obviously not a hacker

They caught him, didn't they?

Now, if he had just printed the letter on one of the schools printers and (covertly) dropped it off in the principals pigeonhole... (Assuming hid didn't call his file "l33t h4x0r" or something similar - just add an extra page to the latest essay.)

Of course there could still be ways to get him, but it starts to get really tricky - and thus expensive...

I still don't get why they didn't just fix the issue and keep it quite. Someone must have done something more with the data.

Re: Wouldn't be too hard on Accenture

@Rob Briggs: "None of them get it right because BG iteself doesn't know what it wants"

Have you ever come across a company, who knows what they want? Except for what they have - but better.

Building software with a clean and cohesive vision and specification is piece of cake. Generating that understanding of what the client actually need and make them want it -- that is nearly art.

Punishment

There seems to be a general misconception about the punishment of criminals. As most of us live in civilised countries, the punishment by going to jail is the loss of your freedom - nothing more, nothing else.

We could decide to use ill-treatment as a punishment - for instance as it is done in several Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Secondly, why do you think we punish criminals? To teach them a lesson? Nope.

The reason is to pamper the sense of justice of the victims and the general public, as most people appear to still believe in "an eye for an eye...". The society is however interested in trying to make good citizens of as many of the people in the realm as possible (not just criminals). And locking them up is a really expensive and inefficient way to try and achieve that.

When it comes to the rights of the inmates, you got to remember that they are humans, and have rights as such - human as well as civil. These obviously need to be respected. Monsters live under your bed, when you turn of the light - not in the prisons. At least that is what a recently retired homicide detective superintendent told in an interview last year...

Knowing all these reasons does however not stop me for feeling the desire for revenge over criminals. And I suppose this is a major reason why politicians will keep talking about "harsher punishments" to get more votes rather than trying to take precautionary measures against crime.

@Ash: More like how to scare your clients

I honestly have no idea, why people keep sending word processor files to me. Usually, all I have to do with them, is to read them and provide some kind of response.

Now, I don't care what looser word processor you use to make the text as long as it does the job, and I get at easily to read document. And bloody hell no, am I going install anything in order to do so. If I have, you *will* get "deprioritised".

So, there are a couple of standard format, which I am happy to accept: PDF, PS and ASCII text.

So take your OXML, ODF and even XSL-FO and stick them! None of them are mature enough to become real standards yet.

@Jason Aspinall, Gordon Jahn

@Jasoin Aspinall:

Yes, you are being a complaining git.

The resistance of the generator is varied with nothing more exotic than a gear box.

This should be familiar to everyone who have ever applied "engine brake".

@Gordon Jahn:

That really sounds terrifying!

Considering that Vestas (the manufacturer of the wind turbine) suspects that the failure was due to poor maintenance - and we all know how high "more money to maintenance" ranks on the political agenda...

Black chopper - because this incident will be completely misrepresented in the energy debate to suit the point of view of the government.

ClamAV

Dan, for some reason you neglect to point out, that the reason why Barracuda is claiming to defend Free- and Open Source Software is because what they are actually shipping is ClamAV. And that a defeat would set precedence to sue everyone using ClamAV on their gateways.

I know it is mentioned in the very beginning - but beyond that is it completely absent.

For anyone desiring a different view on the story - try Ars Technica:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080129-barracuda-defends-open-source-antivirus-from-patent-attack.html

Their reasoning for Symantec and McAfee to settle is, that it was probably cheaper (and definitely safer) to do.

Hardcore violence?

"Dispatch them by spraying grass cuttings at them before they make divots with slide tackles or, if close enough, *mow them down*!"

Although, mowing down footballers can't be all that gory in a Wii...

Re: Call me ignorant, but..

A redheaded Paris Hilton, it would seem.

Thus, I take she is another american bimbo, who have more breast and money than brains.

Besides that - I have no idea... And I suppose that is actually a good thing.

Re: @ Chris W

Oh - I know the answer to that one: The boats where send to Australia!

But what does that have to do with anything? ...

Back to Bash-the-American. It is all a cultural thing - and the US simply don't have the cultural history Europe does - for obvious reasons. For just as obvious reasons is it completely infeasible to try and teach all school children about these things - they are busy enough learning their own history!

Yes, it is odd, that a country, which resembles us so much, is so different. But observing their current military and technological lead, they must be doing something right.

I am, however, fairly certain that many Americans will agree with, that it isn't because of the current president.

Another thing which is unintelligible for a lot of Europeans is the paradox with USA being "the land of the free" - and on the other hand having plenty of laws, which doesn't encourage personal responsibility.

@Jason Harvey

I so agree!

It has nothing to do with how much you have to pay for abusing some else's IP - it is about that the IP has to be real. It needs to be profitable to perform R&D and create new IP, but not to seek/buy patents on general terms, vague notions and hot air!

another title

I totally agree.

At the time where the breach were discovered, was it possibly impossible to tell exactly which systems had been compromised. So rather take ALL of them down an do a thorough audit.

On software security and spam <OT>

@Bronek Kozicki

I only worked in the software for a year or so before getting annoyed with that attitude. But hey - on some point they will just have to scrap the entire source base and start over with whatever the specifications have evolved to. And the customers will of course demand the same features as in the previous version, which have been under development in 6 years or more.

@Charles Hammond

LOL - what a joke. Closing the net to spammers? For real? That must be some good drugs! Care to share? Or don't you trust me?

Please get a clue before you make more of these nonsensical comments! And please don't relay them to anyone with any kind of public influence - perhaps except your local sysadmin.

More seriously:

The best way to stop spam would be, if people could just stop buying stuff advertised in spam - but realising that there will always be stupid people around, this is not gonna happen.

One viable step to stem spam would be to get people to configure their mail-servers properly. Through prudent practices for using my email (like not submitting it to "spamchannels", clicking "unsubscribe" links, etc.), and having well managed mail server, I am down to receiving 10-20 spam-mails a month, whereof most are caught by the server-side filters and the rest by Bayesian filters