tom dial • User • The Register Forums

Saturday 22nd June 2013 22:06 GMT tom dial

Re: This wasn't a hardware flaw. This wasn't a mainframe flaw.

It appears it may not have been a programming flaw, but more a series of operations flaws: first, in committing an error upgrading CA-7, then in compounding it during the attempted rollback, with the finishing touches applied when application recovery procedures were not up to snuff, or perhaps there was not enough available capacity to handle the recovery and normal workloads concurrently. All speak to operations and capacity management, none to the applications or the geriatric implementation language. RBS management may wish to shift blame away and empower themselves to spend great bundles of money, but the facts are as they are.

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Saturday 22nd June 2013 03:40 GMT tom dial

Re: Porting Apps? Downtime.. Eh

It is more than a bit expensive and I, for one, do not believe it without serious proofs offered.

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Saturday 22nd June 2013 03:31 GMT tom dial

Re: AC: This wasn't a hardware flaw. This wasn't a mainframe flaw.

Mainframes have, as has Linux (or Windows) complexities. However, nothing about a mainframe environment, from an application development or management viewpoint, is inherently more complex than a single Linux/Unix/Windows server. The hardware has a MTTF measured in decades; the hardware architecture has been gradually extended and polished for about half a century to remove bottlenecks and single failure points. As has the operating system. While great herds of commodity servers surely have a place, it is unlikely that they have a complexity, managability, or reliability advantage over mainframes for large workloads. It is quite possible that they also have no overall cost advantage.

All that I have read about the RBS failure leads to the conclusion that the cause was management and operator error. As another commenter noted, 450 million GBP probably covers a great deal more than a hardware in-place replacement which would not address the underlying cause anyhow.

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Thursday 20th June 2013 01:16 GMT tom dial

Re: This would be an Assange view of the law..... @Titus

But doesn't that just mean that those who put up the bail forfeit? I seem to remember reading a while back about some long-faced benefactors who would be losing their money over this.

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Saturday 15th June 2013 00:40 GMT tom dial

Re: Polls

And still we have, as far as I know, no real evidence, let alone proof, that the data slurp prevented any terrorist acts or shows promise of doing so in future.

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Sunday 9th June 2013 18:44 GMT tom dial

Re: Classic!

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao would, I think, agree wholeheartedly.

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Sunday 9th June 2013 18:20 GMT tom dial

Re: Spy on 100 % to catch the maybe 0.001% who are doing anything.

This is not about corporations, except as a purported instigator of this, which I seriously doubt. After all, they are getting the information anyhow and do not gain in an obvious way from delivering it up to the government. Indeed, some have resisted (Google among them, and back a few years I think also Verizon). Only governments can lawfully deprive you of life, liberty, or property.

That is not to say that government actions are not desired by and lobbied for by, or do not benefit corporations, but the fundamental problem is that the legislature and executive, with acquiescence and sometimes of the courts, have strayed too far from the original constitutional principles, and that we, the voters, have permitted, encouraged, or even demanded it.

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Sunday 9th June 2013 17:38 GMT tom dial

Of course, the NSA did develop and give away SELinux. I expect that the code has been examined for faults and backdoors or would not have been admitted to the kernel. For free (courtesy of the U. S. taxpayers). Perhaps they are not entirely evil.

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Sunday 9th June 2013 17:31 GMT tom dial

Re: Ive read the US constitution

The law (or portion of the law) that is in violation of the constitution, as amended, is declared inoperative and government actions taken based on the law are voided. I do not recall hearing of large negative consequences for those who enforced enacted laws later found unconstitutional.

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Sunday 9th June 2013 16:04 GMT tom dial

Re: You're late to the party

Terrorism is not done "... because people with nothing to lose found a cause ..." Terrorist acts have long been used by insurrectionists (and criminals) to destroy the effectiveness of governments. The Viet-Nam war and Peru's Shining Path movement provide examples, as do assassinations of government officials in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan and the Mexican side effects of the U. S. War on Drugs. To write off terrorism as desperate acts of the repressed and powerless is simply incorrect.

It is equally incorrect to think that a war on terror can be won with bombers, tanks, and foreign infantry. It is a tactic that is going to be with us for a while.

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Sunday 9th June 2013 15:28 GMT tom dial

Re: Hello pot, this is kettle.

As far as I know, the worst that Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google and similars can do to me with the data I provide them is shower me with ads and help their paying customers induce me to spend money (thank you, Adblock Plus). That, and deliver it to my government, under secret orders about which none may speak.

The government has the power to take away assets by force and impose prison sentences for a large and growing list of offenses. For some offenses it can impose death and for others restrictive lifetime parole. And the government is not shy about using its power - it is not necessary to be a right wing nut to have misgivings about its actions with respect to Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Amish hair cutters or Aaron Swartz.

I know which bothers me more.

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Saturday 8th June 2013 06:06 GMT tom dial

The Verizon (and other?) phone and PRISM programs contradict the plain meaning of the fourth amendment, and if the Patriot Act authorized them, it is sad that it has not been challenged and overturned. It is sadder that a president who took an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" authorized it, and that another, who took the same oath continued and extended it. More: hundreds of our elected senators and representatives passed this atrocious act and, having heard quarterly reports for the last half-dozen years of its yield, they kept their silence almost to a person, reauthorized it, and permitted it to continue.

All of them - presidents, congressmen, senators, and the judges who issued the warrants - should be ashamed, as should the U. S. press for being scooped by the Guardian. I am sure we will see investigations and be treated to indignant speeches, apologies, and justifications from all of them. I am not prepared to believe a single word of it.

And the People - I do not exclude myself - should be ashamed for electing them or acquiescing in their election.

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Saturday 8th June 2013 06:01 GMT tom dial

The Verizon (and other?) phone and PRISM programs clearly contradict the plain meaning of the fourth amendment, and if the Patriot Act authorized them, it is sad that it has not been challenged and overturned. It is sadder that a president who took an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" authorized these programs, and that another, who took the same oath, continued and extended them. More: hundreds of our elected senators and representatives passed this atrocious act and, having heard quarterly reports for the last half-dozen years of its yield, they kept their silence almost to a person, reapproved it, and permitted it to continue.

All of them - presidents, congressmen, senators, and the judges who issued the warrants - should be ashamed, as should the U. S. press for being scooped by the Guardian. I am sure we will see investigations and be treated to indignant speeches, apologies, and justifications from all of them. I am not prepared to believe a single word of it.

And the People - I do not exclude myself - should be ashamed for electing them or acquiescing in their election.

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Thursday 6th June 2013 02:15 GMT tom dial

But if the data is important enough, the free-ness will enable someone with enough intelligence and motivation and motivation to write it from scratch, as you said. With properly open formats the media deterioration and lack of appropriate devices is likely to be the difficult part, something that may not be true with proprietary formats.

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Thursday 6th June 2013 01:57 GMT tom dial

Re: Vint says:-

Like roff/troff? These were quite well documented, as is Tex. And ODF, whatever its claimed limits probably is decently documented. I've seen some old (pre GUI) Wordstar files that I recall looking much like those of roff, although there probably were differences and the formatting might not have been well documented.

I don't think it is unreasonable to assign Microsoft a part of the blame, along with other less successful vendors who probably practiced the same type of obfuscation.

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Thursday 6th June 2013 00:05 GMT tom dial

Clouds are (not necessarily) good for NSA

Nothing about "cloud-like architectures" - what Gen. Alexander actually recommended - requires one to rent computer services from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or another public provider that some of the more cautious/skeptical/paranoid among us might consider possible agents of the US Government.. To a first approximation, these "cloud like architectures" represent a reimplementation of the mainframe concept, and Amazon, Google, et. al. provide the revised version of the service bureau of a half century past that made Ross Perot a wealthy man.

Current cloud-in-a-box offerings from several vendors seem to be precisely the sort of thing Gen. Alexander is recommending: high capacity scaleable units that can be managed and safeguarded more easily, effectively, and cheaply than spread out networks of assorted equipment, each with its own set of vulnerabilities. You may suspect Gen. Alexander's or the government's motives, but there is considerable merit in this recommendation, properly understood.

The question of whether to buy and manage your own cloud or rent service from an external provider is a management choice involving balancing risk and cost. In view of the average competence of IT managements it could well be lower in both cost and risk to rent from large scale providers whose employees may have more expertise than those available for hire locally; and that could be true even with the possibility of things like NSA eavesdropping and penetration.

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Tuesday 4th June 2013 22:25 GMT tom dial

Re: tooth and nail

It seemed when I first read about it to be more about Apple being able to control the the price of books offered by other vendors. Surely they can offer the material through their iStore at whatever price they wish irrespective of what others are doing. They might even succeed in commanding a higher than average price due to other considerations like convenience and application lock in. I see no reason for anyone to consider that a problem.

What concerned the US Department of Justice, as I understand, is that they collaborated with the 5 publishers to set the price for all sellers at the same level, so that Barnes & Noble, for instance, would not be able to try to improve their market share by lowering the offering price.

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Sunday 26th May 2013 19:14 GMT tom dial

Re: Utter nonsense.

Second (or third). As a test I looked for 'elitebook' on foundem, google, and bing. Bing and google returned five sponsored links each for purchase of an HP EliteBook at various prices. Bing's first three unsponsored links, in order, were a Wikipedia article, hp.com promotion site, and five images. Google's first three unsponsored links were to the hp.com promotion site (as in Bing), the HP's generic laptop site, and the Wikipedia article (as with Bing). Foundem returned three links to EliteBook accessories before the first for the product itself - all of them to other foundem pages.

Clearly a win for Google, with Bing not far behind, and Foundem a rather distant third. I also tried Foundem's link for Bike Gear, and received nothing but a whine about how they had been unable to maintain this and a number of other categories to their "exacting standards" since Google's Panda update in April 2011, over two years ago. It also appeared that the link might really have been for motorbike gear rather than the gear for human powered bicycles in which I would have had some interest. I allow the possibility, however, that that could reflect usage differences between the UK and the US.

If Foundem were any good, people would use it directly and they would have no need to rant about Google. As it appears to me, they produce less satisfactory results than Google (and Bing) even when accessed from their own home page. Perhaps they should tend to business or fold their tent and slink home.

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Saturday 25th May 2013 18:50 GMT tom dial

Re: @Greg J Preece

One specious argument after another. They apply pretty much unchanged to the used car market, for instance. Should the manufacturers then be enabled to eliminate or control that market?

The only possibly legitimate argument I have seen, but not (so far) in this thread, is that the purchaser of a game might be able to sell it *and* continue to have it to play. That could well reduce the number of first sales Identical arguments can be and have been applied to eBooks and other digital media. I suspect rather strongly that the "problem" has a cryptographically based solution involving a difficult to replicate physical token that would have to be transferred to enable the game to work.

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Saturday 25th May 2013 16:36 GMT tom dial

Re: Government

First sentence in second paragraph should read "People enjoy (gambling | smoking | drinking | drugs), and left to themselves some of them will engage ...". Fixes up the intended meaning.

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Saturday 25th May 2013 16:30 GMT tom dial

Re: Why the slant?

I comment as a former Ohio citizen and holder of a graduate degree in Political Science. The voters of Ohio, under Issue 3, granted two to four companies the right to open exactly four casinos in precisely defined locations. At election time it was well known that there were exactly two such companies, neither based in Ohio, that were in the running. Worse, they put it in the Constitution, which properly only should describe the structure of the government, the way laws are made, and the limits of government action. See the U. S. Constitution for a reasonably uncorrupt example. By contrast, the Ohio Constitution runs to 124 pages of fine print, much of it cruft along the lines of the casino amendment, which alone runs to five and a half pages.

The politicians were on board because of greed for the tax revenue lost to neighboring states with casinos; campaign contributions might have has some persuasive effect as well. The 52% of the voters who favored the issue probably saw benefits is (possibly) lower taxation - sin taxes always are easier to favor than others - and convenience - the gamblers no longer would have to go to Michigan, New York, or West Virginia. Some probably just thought that people should be allowed to gamble if they wanted.

It is of some interest to note that the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a big booster in 2009, has published articles more recently suggesting that some are, in a sense, being "victimized" by the casinos. Presumably these are the same "poor, elderly, and vulnerable slot players" of whom prosecutor McGinty and Senator Hughes were so solicitous.

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Saturday 25th May 2013 15:35 GMT tom dial

Government

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. (H. L. Mencken). Also see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken

People enjoy (gambling | smoking | drinking | drugs), and left to themselves will engage in these activities to an extent harmful to themselves and others. Rather than limiting the proscriptive laws to the behavior that is directly harmful, the legislators, motivated partly by the knowledge, seemingly endorsed by the voters in the last election, that they are better than others, continue on to legislate against activities they think might lead to harmful behavior, and even thoughts that somehow make the bad behavior worse. Thus we get laws regulating gambling, laws against certain drugs that stuff our prisons to overflowing and indirectly bring about enormous harm in Mexico, and defining and providing "enhanced" sentences for "hate crimes".

It does not hurt that there are financially interested beneficiaries in the form of casino and racetrack owners, law enforcement agencies, and private prison operators to advocate for such laws, or that taxes can be collected on the regulated products or activities. One always must ask: "qui bono" when evaluating the laws. In the case of squashing the internet cafes, it clearly is the owners of legal gambling places and the State of Ohio. It clearly is not the gamblers; they will find other ways and places, some legal (perhaps only for the time being), to satisfy their urges.

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Tuesday 14th May 2013 21:19 GMT tom dial

Redact not!

From the article it appears that MIT and JStor want names redacted so their owners can be free of the consequences of their statements and actions. I don't see any justice in this: those statements and actions led, perhaps without intending to do so, to terrible consequences. Let the names out, and let the public censure and shunning begin. If protection is necessary it should fall on the Federal government that kept the Swartz prosecution going beyond all reason.

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Wednesday 24th April 2013 04:17 GMT tom dial

Re: our data

Typically, the only real winners in U. S. class action lawsuits are the opposing attorneys. The individual members of the plaintiff class tend to be rewarded with coupons or amounts of money that barely buy a breakfast in a greasy spoon. How desirable is that, really? In the case of the class affected by Google's data snatch it is doubtful if any member was damaged in a measurable way, and they gave away the data anyhow. Some did so because they were too ignorant to prevent it. Others simply do not care. I have an acquaintance who offers an open "guest" SSID and also continues to run his main wifi without encryption.

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Thursday 18th April 2013 11:34 GMT tom dial

Re: Copyleft... bullshit

Read the license and its preamble. The GPL is concerned with freedom of those who acquire and use software and similar products, not yours, assuming you are a developer. Most other licences I have struggled through are concerned to ensure that those who buy and use software have as little freedom as possible, retaining as much as possible. I think it fairly clear which approach maximizes freedom.

The argument for *GPL* is that maximizing global freedom also will maximize global utility. Economists may argue about that, but I rather suspect it is true on some definitions of utility. What it does not do is maximize the utility, defined generally as profit, of individual developers or their employers. That doesn't bother me a lot.

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Friday 29th March 2013 18:48 GMT tom dial

Re: Pick & choose laws

Not easily done for various reasons, not least that, as earlier posters observed, a large fraction of the citizens are too occupied with their personal diversions to take time to understand what's going on and have too little imagination to see how the laws might apply in practice, and to themselves. In addition, aside from the strangeness associated with political campaigns, most citizens accept the present regime as fully legitimate with a few occasional problems that need a fix. How else should we understand the high incarceration rate for drug related offenses that do little measurable harm to anyone but for being illegal? This is fine for political stability, but gives prosecutors a great deal of latitude in framing charges and leaning on defendants; and they want yet more.

But Yorgo is correct: whining has not and will not do much good.

Can't see a reason for the downvotes.

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Wednesday 27th March 2013 23:36 GMT tom dial

"Oasis is a 'non-practising entity'(NPE), as patent trolls are called in polite circles."

No. In polite circles such as Oasis (and IV) are likely to be described in terms that are polite euphemisms for the scumbags that they are. They are called NPE's primarily by the attorneys who represent them.

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Monday 25th March 2013 15:05 GMT tom dial

Re: #FAIL

Can't say for sure about Android, but PS3 OtherOS capability was advertised, if perhaps not heavily promoted, for the original and, I believe, first revision units. At least one company, whose name I don't recall at the moment, offered a PS3 with preinstalled Yellow Dog Linux for about the same as the combined price of the PS3 and the Yellow Dog installation media. I bought a PS3 for the BD player, as Sony adoption of Blue Ray appeared to presage the death of HD-DVD, and for the OtherOS feature. I have not upgraded the Sony firmware since they removed it (and will not do so), and eliminated Sony from my hardware candidate lists, especially after their action against George Hotz.

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Monday 11th March 2013 01:55 GMT tom dial

I believe this is the same Massachusetts where state CIO Peter Quinn, after deciding to promote Open Document Format, was hounded from office following untrue allegations of misbehavior that some thought might be originated by Microsoft.

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Friday 8th March 2013 21:27 GMT tom dial

Fail

Nonsense. The open source world *does* work like that:

Debian (like): apt-get update; apt-get [upgrade | dist-upgrade]

Red Hat (like): yum update

And I am pretty sure that there are GUI applications that would do the same.

And you only have to reboot if the kernel is updated, and then only to use the new kernel - the old one usually works fine until reboot at a convenient time.

Windows, on the other hand almost always requires at least one reboot. I recall a time when a Windows XP bearing laptop I was patching required three consecutive applications of patches, each followed by a reboot, to be brought up to date. While that admittedly had not been updated in a while, in the same circumstance a Debian Linux installation would have been brought up to date with one update cycle and one reboot. And the patch set will have been reasonably tested and thoroughly integrated (assuming the update is from the "stable" target). I am less familiar with Red Hat or SuSE, but suspect they are much the same.

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Wednesday 6th March 2013 23:04 GMT tom dial

Re: Huh.

Total nonsense - if you pick the right distribution. I have a Debian image that was installed originally on a dual PPro in about 1995 and was repeatedly upgraded to current releases and moved to new hardware over the intervening years and wound up in a KVM VM; no reinstallation, ever. The upgrade process has not been entirely free of trouble, but never was so bad as to justify reinstallation. Most of the problems resulted from switching to the testing release some months before the formal release and therefore the normal things to expect running what is effectively beta software. The upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 was entirely uneventful and only needed one reboot. I expect other Debian based distributions perform similarly.

Downvoted you tool

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Monday 25th February 2013 16:30 GMT tom dial

Re: No need for foul language.

"The vast majority of major linux users use RedHat derived OSes" - I am a bit skeptical about this statement, although it obviously is in need of a definition of "major." See:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2012mca.php

This does not report usage, to be sure, but in the universe of Gnu/Linux users, high regard is likely to be followed by adoption, especially since the various distributions are substitutable one for another.

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Monday 25th February 2013 16:18 GMT tom dial

Re: Binary signed by Microsoft?

If by "much of the world" you mean "Microsoft", yes. In watching this general topic with a certain amount of attentiveness for the last year or so, I nave not noticed others showing more than acquiescence in a move transparently aimed at cementing a monopoly and extending it to a new class of devices (not that MS seem to having much success with Windows RT). Code signing is not the real issue: Most or all of the code i install on Debian systems is signed and I think validated at installation time, although not at each use.

While secure boot may have some benefit in system management and attack detection/prevention, I don't feel that I actually own a piece of hardware if I do not receive, with it, the software required to generate a self-signed platform key and install and maintain the secure boot software validation key chain (including the platform key of my choice. And requiring me to trust Microsoft (or any other entity) to determine what software I install is a nonstarter - they have not earned that trust.

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Monday 25th February 2013 15:43 GMT tom dial

Re: Quite frankly.....

So what you seem to be saying is that Microsoft went with secure boot for the private purpose of maintaining and extending an effective monopoly, designed their implementation to inconvenience or prevent use by providers of other operating systems (Linux is not the only one), and arm-twisted hardware manufacturers with the threat of second tier status for noncompliance.

And you are OK with that? Go away!

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Friday 22nd February 2013 17:05 GMT tom dial

Re: Ubuntu is dead

There is, of course, Mint/Debian or plain Debian. For ease of maintenance it's hard to beat, it's extremely stable (even Testing), and has more packages and applications than any reasonable person ever could hope to use. I've even weaned myself from ye Gnome 2 interface and no longer think Gnome 3 a total abomination.

As for the inevitable whining about difficult installation and the need to get down and dirty with a command-line window, I call BS. Debian is tolerably close to Windows in ease of installation on a wide range of hardware, and is not much different in detail from Ubuntu. The main challenge seems to be for those who want to do a netinstall using WiFi on hardware requiring proprietary firmware.

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Monday 18th February 2013 18:32 GMT tom dial

Re: "Comfortable with the terminal"

If you enjoy doing it the hard way, go for it. Debian includes an NVidia non-free installer that works well. I would guess that Debian-derived distributions like Ubuntu and Mint do, and wouldn't be surprised if many of the others I haven't used, such as Fedora and OpenSuSE also do.

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Monday 18th February 2013 18:14 GMT tom dial

Re: Another example of why Linux fails to gain market share

"Ubuntu is the leader ..." - maybe not forever, though; see

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2012mca.php

Almost all PCs come with a preinstalled (Windows) OS and only a tiny percentage ever install a new one. It would be interesting to see what fraction of those who do so install Linux rather than a new version of Windows. Although I doubt it's a majority, I suspect it is far larger than the fraction of Linux in the entire PC population. Furthier, I suspect that those who install Gnu/Linux now are not that much more technically sophisticated than those who install Windows; and they don't have to be to be successful with most of the major distributions.

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Monday 18th February 2013 16:17 GMT tom dial

Re: "Comfortable with the terminal"

Debian has a decent graphical package manager (synaptic) with a facility to add repositories - no command line needed here. Ubuntu, and I suppose Mint and other Debian or Ubuntu based distributions also should have this and possibly other possibilities. Command line use may be more convenient for some, but is unnecessary as long as the desired package can be found in some distribution compatible repository.

It becomes necessary to use a terminal at about the point where the install process has become "download, extract, configure, make, make install." Fewer do that than install an OS, and not many do that. The fact is that Gnu/Linux will not become common on user desktops until some time after a major manufacturer offers it in place of, or at least on a par with, Windows. As has happened with Android and phones/tablets other than those from Apple.

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Tuesday 12th February 2013 03:30 GMT tom dial

Fail

If I read the Microsoft documentation correctly (and it has not been revised), Windows 8 certified x86 compatible systems must allow the owner to disable secure boot. I am no fan of Microsoft in this matter, but the blame in such cases should be directed to the hardware manufacturers.

And yes, please out those manufacturers providing unsuitably locked-down boards.

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Monday 11th February 2013 13:37 GMT tom dial

Re: Couldn't Samsung...

They probably have contracts that require them to deliver. Failure to perform could lead to other, and far more justified, lawsuits as well as reducing any good will they may have with other customers. This is a nonstarter for a manager capable of rational thought.

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Saturday 9th February 2013 01:09 GMT tom dial

Re: What a load of self serving tosh..

- Eric Schmidt is not nice - probably true; 1 correct.

- If you don't want google to know that, don't use google; 1 wrong

- If you don't want google's "helpfulness" don't use google; 1 wrong.

- Google will comply ... "or when it's in the business interest to collaborate" - made up that last part; 1 wrong.

- Google location tracking - If you dislike it don't use google; 1 wrong.

- " ... taking your life in your hands [with Apple Maps]" - I seem to recall a problem with misdirecting people into the Australian desert. A lawsuit on the basis of this is not likely to succeed; 1 wrong.

If people are are misled and become careless of their personal details, they at least contributed. Maybe the bigger problem is that the privacy policies are long enough that hardly anyone reads them; Half credit.

- Creativity with the truth - a common failing in and out of business circles, so not very relevant; Half credit.

- Trust google or the government - with prosecutors like Carmen Ortiz (Aaron Swartz case) and Steven Dettelbach (scourge of the Amish beard trimmers) I am uncertain about trusting the government too far. Other opinions may vary; Half credit.

- 'Too much regulatory activity involving google ..." - most of it obvious rent seeking and sour grapes; 1 wrong.

- Schmidt's comments on privacy - I heard him at Oracle World and took it as a statement of fact, not a prescription for action. Still, (#1) he probably is what many would consider "not nice"; Half credit.

2-1/2 of 10 correct = 25%; less than a D-

Mr. Jones' telling statement is buried in the middle: "You came to us. If you felt we might betray you, you wouldn't come to us." That google receives 70 or 80 per cent. of the search requests suggests a fairly high level of trust.

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Friday 1st February 2013 00:11 GMT tom dial

Re: Oh dear ....

Late in 2010, for very considerably less than today's dollar exchange for 1900GBP, I built a system - Tyan server board, 2 Xeon 5630 processors, 24 GB memory, 3x500 GB SATA disks, PS, and case roomy enough to hold 3 or more additional disks. It was to be a server, so I used the onboard video, but with a high-end adapter it still would have cost significantly less than the Apple. The goal at the time was to see what I could do for about the cost of an Epson Equity III+ (12 MHz 286, 640K + 2M add-in memory, a 40MB disk, and a VGA card. I was so astonished that I bought the parts and built it.

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Thursday 31st January 2013 14:41 GMT tom dial

Re: Where is Eadon to tell us how this is all MS's fault??

It is doubtful that Samsung "support" Windows in any meaningful sense beyond putting it on the disk.

UEFI secure boot, I thought, was intended to prevent corruption of the boot process in addition, of course, to the primary goal of preventing installation of alternative operating systems.

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Sunday 27th January 2013 16:11 GMT tom dial

Probably not having the intended result

The spotlight on U. S. Attorney Ortiz and her sidekicks Stephen Heymann and Scott Garland are unlikely to have advanced any of their careers either in the Department of Justice or electoral politics. Embarassing your boss and your boss's boss publicly is not often a good thing, particularly when the latter is the President of the U. S.

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Wednesday 23rd January 2013 02:57 GMT tom dial

Re: Obama administraton

After "life long bureaucrat" this wanders off into the inappropriate. We should not, and hopefully try not to, judge people by ethnicity or race or religion. In a case like this, it draws attention from what should be the real points. The first is that prosecutors generally have a great deal of power and unless they have the internal controls necessary to use it wisely (and sometimes to resist their superiors' demands) risk doing great damage. In this, they are enabled by sometimes crude and overly broad laws such as the CFAA, RICO, and hate crime specifications that allowor even encourage them to elevate relatively minor offenses into major felonies with potential for large fines and lengthy imprisonment. In the short run, the damage is to the individuals who, like Aaron Swartz, are pressured, perhaps, beyond their ability to cope; in the long run the damage is to the legitimacy of the regime, as greater numbers of citizens come to believe the government is unworthy of their trust.

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Friday 25th January 2013 19:41 GMT tom dial

Re: The Right to Free Speech

Downvoted primarily for the third paragraph and the notion that speech, however nasty or objectionable, constitutes either attack or oppression. I assume the several others did so for similar reasons.

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Friday 25th January 2013 18:52 GMT tom dial

Re: @Lee Dowling - IT's what happens when you don't listen to your customers

Lost me totally beginning at "Apple have *started* ... (emphasis added).

And Apple's main reaction to Android seems to have been to sue the manufacturers who use it. I suppose that might be considered innovation, but not in the context here.

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Friday 18th January 2013 05:14 GMT tom dial

Upvoted on general principles. U. S. Attorneys are appointed by the President, with advice and consent of the Senate, and serve at the President's pleasure.

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Friday 18th January 2013 04:40 GMT tom dial

Re: @Fibbles - Prosecutor not to blame

The basic criminal offense appears to be trespass in a network closet reported elsewhere to have been used also as a sleeping area by a homeless person. That, and violation of JStor's terms of service by automating search and download. I'm not a lawyer, but given that JStor declined to pursue the matter (credit to them on that) I wonder if the normal result, if processed locally, wouldn't have been a misdemeanor no-contest plea with a fine and probation.

One real problem with this is treating TOS violations, which ought to be a civil matter anyhow, as a high level federal felony. That is not allowable in all federal court districts. As a US taxpayer I object to the investigators prosecutors spending time on such relatively trivial matters as this particular case. One might infer reasonably that the federal police agencies and U. S. attorney offices need downsizing.

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Re: This wasn't a hardware flaw. This wasn't a mainframe flaw.

Re: Porting Apps? Downtime.. Eh

Re: AC: This wasn't a hardware flaw. This wasn't a mainframe flaw.

Re: This would be an Assange view of the law..... @Titus

Re: Polls

Re: Classic!

Re: Spy on 100 % to catch the maybe 0.001% who are doing anything.

Re: Ive read the US constitution

Re: You're late to the party

Re: Hello pot, this is kettle.

Re: Vint says:-

Clouds are (not necessarily) good for NSA

Re: tooth and nail

Re: Utter nonsense.

Re: @Greg J Preece

Re: Government

Re: Why the slant?

Government

Redact not!

Re: our data

Re: Copyleft... bullshit

Re: Pick & choose laws

"Oasis is a 'non-practising entity'(NPE), as patent trolls are called in polite circles."

Re: #FAIL

Fail

Re: Huh.

Re: No need for foul language.

Re: Binary signed by Microsoft?

Re: Quite frankly.....

Re: Ubuntu is dead

Re: "Comfortable with the terminal"

Re: Another example of why Linux fails to gain market share

Re: "Comfortable with the terminal"

Fail

Re: Couldn't Samsung...

Re: What a load of self serving tosh..

Re: Oh dear ....

Re: Where is Eadon to tell us how this is all MS's fault??

Probably not having the intended result

Re: Obama administraton

Re: The Right to Free Speech

Re: @Lee Dowling - IT's what happens when you don't listen to your customers

Re: @Fibbles - Prosecutor not to blame

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