Posts by Charles 9

Re: No reschedule needed here

Ok, what other PC OS can play the full Steam game collection (including recent titles like Fallout 4) at full speed without excessive use of resources (ruling out a VM)? Solve that and I'll jump, but be warned my last attempt was abysmal.

Re: Regarding fulfilling all desires

But what happens if the pace of technology is such that newly-unfulfilled desires turn out to already be fulfillable with current tech. That's the big scare with this technological displacement: the avalanche effect of finding any new field you try can already be done by an application of the technology. Even supposedly-sacrosanct positions like the cashier are making way for self-checkouts. If it's a choice between a self-checkout and starvation, the former wins. And don't think people will automatically gravitate towards a human over a machine. Would people prefer a jerk to a machine. for example?

No, in a capitalist system, that is precisely and completely the purpose of a business. In fact, that's the purpose of anything: to fill a demand and be compensated for it. If it isn't worth the money, the demand doesn't get filled (which is what happens when P and Q fail to intersect). No one HAS to supply the service, remember that.

No, the most fundamental problem is that the market's too skewed, in this case with labor supply. The economics of labor have changed to such a degree that the labor pool is massively overprovisioned. The only rational solution is to find a way to reduce the surplus, but that run flat into the irrational factor that is self-preservation.

Re: Biology my friend ...

Unless they turn inward, close the walled garden, and hash it out amongst themselves.

Re: Mixed feelings

So what do you do when there are 12 people stranded in the middle of the desert but only 6 bottles of water.

Because that's essentially the problem right now. And putting it this way, it becomes clear there's no happy ending in store.

Re: Why not just dollar value?

The US considered a consumption tax in the past but turned it down; too easy to encourage under-the-table transactions.

Re: IT IS NOT A LAW

That still leaves physical stores in the lurch, and they have good reason to be mad.

Re: Workaround?

Most elites won't take a Green Dot unless it's REGISTERED. Registration attaches a name and address (both verifiable under PCI regs) to the card. Plus most of those cards restrict online use. You usually need one that's specifically meant for it.

Re: Advertising on the internet doesn't work

"Pages don't wotk unless you enable some frameworrk that is underneath the ad pages. Yes Google I mean you and a lot of others.

Those sites get blacklisted."

Then what happens when you find out you've blacklisted everything? Don't laugh. This will come sooner rather than later. And then what'll you do? Abandon the Internet? Then welcome back to reality. Just look outside. Ads absolutely everywhere. Spam IP phone calls with fake numbers; one-way junk mail (try tor return it and it gets re-returned; I've tried). Heck, Americans have it easy when it comes to ads in sports, as apart from racing we tend keep them to the walls and the TV scoreboard. Elsewhere? Don't be surprised to see them on fields, roads, helmets, bats, uniforms, anywhere there's a surface. And out in the street, on the telephone poles, windows, billboards, windows, bus stops. And let's not start with the airwaves; it's why I gave up listening to the radio. The few minutes of good music aren't worth the deluge of corny and obnoxious ads. And this isn't new stuff. The ad wars have been going on for over a century now; don't think HOSTS files and ad-blockers will be the end of it. It didn't in the real world, and it won't here. You either live with ads, or you don't live at all.

Re: Err...

Ever heard the phrase "Half the truth, twice the lie?"

Re: Start at the source.

OR it's just pretty damn popular and something hot just came down the pipe. Would look a lot like the same thing. Potential false positive there.

Re: No. Not regulation.

"If government regulation is the answer, then you're asking the wrong question."

Well then, who else can run the jails? Certain necessities of civilization are, in a monetary sense, sinks. Meaning there's no incentive for private enterprise to do it. Yet something needs to be done to control the genuine criminal element out to pilfer from the common man. If the status quo is unacceptable, and there's no money angle for the private sector, guess who's left?

So basically, if you don't like government regulation, what happens when it's the ONLY option left? If you can't trust the government at this point, you can't trust anyone, and that means anarchy.

Re: It's got nothing to do with money

It WILL involve spending something: usually money (translated from time and/or resources). It's always been that way, even down to physical defenses in the past. Separating resources will cost you time because it's harder to reach, especially if you face the dilemma of information that's both vitally secret to your business but needed all the time, like a "Top Secret" door that nonetheness has to be opened several hundred times a day, any one of which can cause the corporate jewels to be stolen. Furthermore, no security in the world can do much against a skilled insider.

Re: Not quite

But truly good things need no marketing. They sell on their reputations alone.

Re: essentially regulate almost all computers

Basically, the Stateful Internet, aka Big Brother. It's either that or a descent into Internet Anarchy.

Re: Wishful thinking

Probably too expensive. Unless you can make it cost-competitive (like in at most a penny or two more than existing stock, which is unlikely given the glut of pre-secure stuff), anyone who tries will get undercut. Remember, the average person doesn't care. All you're hearing are squeaky wheels.

Re: Mismatch

"Yes, I know total security is impossible, but a big wealthy company should already be following best practices including basics such as monitoring for suspect activity."

But as you shut doors, edge cases stop being edge cases. And one of the biggest problems is also probably the toughest to stop: moles.

Re: ThyssenKrupp said the attack was not attributable to security failings

But some security failings can never be effectively policed, like moles. Is it really a security failing if it's one beyond anyone's ability to secure? Just like is it really anyone's fault if someone gets killed by a bolt out of the blue?

If it were only that, you could stuff an XP/IE instance in a VM and call it a day. No, more often than not hardware is the real problem. It's also one of the few things you can't virtualize, especially where custom hardware is involved.

Re: "Sainsburys supermarkets still have XP in their stores as well"

INCLUDING the back end machines which definitely AREN'T POS units?

Re: The fault is the operating system

Um...given patient confidentiality mandates, how do you do SaaS without breaking those mandates?

Malware can come in through other means (even the keyboard), plus your network could get accidentally (or maliciously) bridged.

Re: The fault is the operating system

So how do you handle long-term business needs in a world full of short-sighted, penny-pinching investors and executives?

"The solution is to promote people on merit, ie. actually delivering completed and usable projects rather than for brownnosing skills. We might then see a reduction in multi billion pound projects failing."

You forget. People LIE. And people BELIEVE lies. Given that, people CHEAT. And it's part of the human condition. You can't FORCE people to promote on merit, not even with the law. Disagreeable laws are just ignored as ink on a page. Look at Prohibition.

As long as people respond instinctively to the "What's in it for me" angle, you can't have the utopia.

Re: Security concerns?

"Sorry, that is simply not true. I work on PACS systems with studies that are normally GB's and sometimes TB's in size. These are routinely transferred across hospital LANs and are also transferred across N3 with no problem. A GB study can be retrieved from a remote datacentre and the first images displayed in <2 seconds (SLA) with the remainder of the images viewable within 20 seconds."

Assuming a top-of-the-line network. Bet you that's not the case in general.

"Copying patient information onto non-encrypted USB drives is banned across the NHS and is seriously slower than LAN/WAN transfer."

What about encrypted drives, then? Plus how do you enforce such a thing when time is precious?

I've spotted a few other places that still use XP-based machines, mainly due to sunk costs and recent cycle changes that missed the boat. They won't be moving for a while yet, if at all.

Re: The fault is the operating system

Clarification: It's main job is to allow the user to run applications. If one only needed to run applications without user intervention, then you can get away with something simpler like a scheduler. Only thing is, users have a wide range of aptitudes. Many need help (the ones who wouldn't know a network fob from a thumb drive), and you have to cater for them. And their #1 priority, the #1 priority of ANY job, is to COMPLETE the job. All else comes secondary. And no, you can't always train them, and if you raise your standards too high, you run the risk of no takers. And remember, medicine and computers aren't necessarily highly overlapping fields of expertise.

Custom hardware simply cannot be virtualized since their very function is considered a trade secret; you can't virtualize what you don't know. Thus we have the story of that computerized lathe that runs on XP because Vista and up doesn't support the ISA bus anymore and the lathe is controlled by a proprietary controller (trade secret, remember?) fitted to an ISA slot on the computer. Can't be upgraded due to that ISA card, and the lathe is still pretty young (meant to last decades and is still being amortized, so you can only cross your fingers.

And depending on the direction hardware takes in future, this may become more common rather than less, given that most ARM SoCs are built with fixed hardware in mind and therefore are more likely to use hard-and-fast memory maps rather than any kind of enumerating bus (USB being the possible exception).

Except you never know when someone makes an effort to BRIDGE the devices, perhaps by a MAC-spoofed mole. Remember, not even Sneakernets and airgaps are immune.

Re: So what?

Plus you can never completely isolate a system. After all, there MUST be a way to transfer information in or out or it's useless as a device. As long as method exists, a method can exist to infect it. Not even Sneakernets are immune.

That's always been the one failing of a government by any kind of popular agreement or consensus. Some of the humdrum necessities of civilization also happen to be very irksome: like taxes. Not to mention subject to considerable squabbling. It's only something existential in nature like a crisis that puts people together. End the crisis, and it's back to the squabbling. Humans appear to be more a tribal kind of animal under normal circumstances. Bigger than that, and we start seeing competition.

An autocrat would have the capability to, as they say, cut the crap, but of course that has the risk of being subject to that person's whims. It's really a difficult thing to work out either way.

Re: 'up'grading is overrated

"Getting rid of legacy IT can be difficult if some essential software or hardware is not ported to a newer platform; we do still have some productive SGI workstations at my work...."

And that's the point I was making. There are any number of devices that use XP or lower that either (a) cannot be upgraded at all, probably because the manufacturer went out of business taking their trade secrets to the grave, or (b) are such that the only way to fix the software issue is to replace the VERY expensive hardware. If upgrading is either impossible or too expensive, you end up with what I called a "stuck" machine. Think of it like someone holding an underwater mortgage (they owe more to the bank than their home is actually worth, so selling the home to close the mortgage is not an option).

"Moving to Vista wouldn't help (that also goes end-of-life in April) unless drivers/apps work in later versions of Windows."

I said Vista because that was the epoch point for Windows newer driver and program models. IOW, if a program or driver can work on Vista, odds are pretty good it'll work on 7, which IS still supported, and passing fair it can work on 8 and up because beyond Vista they didn't monkey too much with basic hardware driver models, and 8.1 and 10 reinforced desktop program support.