Posts by Steve Knox

Re: Who had the loss?

From the article:

"The workaround was killed off after three Brits sued Google for breaching their privacy rights."

Individual suits already solved the root cause; class action suits which only line lawyers' pockets are superfluous.

Re: Excuse my lack of understanding ...

Oracle is pushing for costs not normally considered in legal cases.

Take this example:

"Full time as in not half time?"

This question requires a specific quantity of time (you cannot assuredly have half of an indeterminate amount). That specific quantity would be "full time", and more than that would be "more than full time". For illustration, consider a standard working week in the US. Full time is normally 40 hours per week, half time 20 hours per week, and more than 40 would be "overtime." Oracle's interpretation of "full" in this context would allow up to 168 hours per week as "full time.", simply because that time exists within a week, even though it is not part of the customary definition.

Or take the "full parking lot" as one with no free parking spaces. Oracle's argument, essentially, would be that such a lot is NOT full because you CAN cram more cars into it (by filling up the driving lanes, stacking cars on top of each other, etc.) But such an interpretation would ruin the functional definition of a parking lot, being a place to temporarily place vehicles to be readily removed for use later.

Re: How they test matters

Actually, you can program testing robots to cycle through all of those modes and more. Will Samsung? No idea. But just because you can't conceive of it, don't say it won't or can't happen.

Re: So it's...

Hot fudge.

Very, very hot fudge.

Re: I'm not sure it's that easy

The EU also suffers if there is no workable agreement made.

True, but you cannot say with a straight face that the EU will suffer as much as the UK, or that they will suffer as much as they would if there were not the framework which allows them to renegotiate trade with those who choose to leave.

There are two eventual conclusion to this situation, one where there are 2 winner and one where there are 2 losers.

It's not quite that simple. There is a spectrum of possible outcomes. It is possible for the EU to negotiate agreements which benefit them and harm the UK, just not very likely (although if UK.gov is convinced that the harm of such an agreement is less that the harm they'll incur if they don't agree, it becomes more likely.) It is also possible for the UK to do the opposite, though even less likely. Most likely is that both lose some out of this deal.

I have to disagree with your representation of the 2-winner conclusion as worthy of inclusion as one of the two major possible conclusions. Brexit is already imposing considerable costs and complexity on the EU-UK relationship on both sides, and the purported regulatory and social freedoms are largely ephemeral. The 2-winner scenario is the least likely of all of the conclusions to this.

Why the icon?

Referring to the current POTUS?

Your statement is more truth than joke.

Re: Why do we need IPv6

Seriously. Why more than one public IP per household, and maybe a dozen or so on average per organization?

Because most people have more than one device, and most organizations have more than a dozen or so devices.

No.

Most people do not have eve ONE device which needs to be publicly accessible. That's why most ISPs only provide one IP address per consumer connection; you have to use a NATing router (some ISPs even NAT you again internally). Have you got a consumer-grade WiFi router at home? Then you're almost certainly using NAT and getting private IP addresses for devices on your home network -- probably 192.168.x.x but possibly 10.x.x.x.

I don't know of any organization which does not use NAT to hide all non-public machines. Yes, you'll need an IP address for your webserver (but not a dedicated one if you use shared hosting), e-mail server (ditto on the shared hosting) and any edge routers you have (except those for private WAN routing) but for most companies that comes to well below a dozen IPs. Those few who need more are likely using the internet to allow tunneling VPN access to or between physical locations. This should average out to, as I said, fewer than a dozen per organization.

Re: VW-ing (cheating) the App-Store screening?

Could Trend Micro have coded the apps to detect when they are being tested by Apple and not do the data slurp?

More likely Apple does the test on a clean VM, so no data to slurp.

Re: Scope creep

"phase two when you'll have to start disposing of the bodies..."

Or phase 3:

"I'm not dead yet!"

....

"Who's that?"

"Dunno. Must be a software developer."

"Why?"

"He hasn't got shit all over himself."

Re: Forget the geeky stuff, sort out the user experience.

1. What's hard to understand about GNU Image Manipulation Program? It's a Program to Manipulate Images, brought to you by GNU. Makes sense to me.

2. Neither Adobe PhotoShop nor JASC PaintShop Pro allow you to sell or buy photos or paints. How is that easier to understand? I think it's more that you're familiar with them so you assume novices will be as well. At best you may argue that PhotoShop has become a colloquial term, but that's simply brand penetration, not clear naming to begin with.

3. Even if you only know it by GIMP, since it is not pre-installed on any systems that I know of, how would it even end up on a novice user's machine without them downloading it, at which point one would assume they've been to a website which describes to some degree what the software does.

Re: Default passwords? In this day and age?

What!? They've hacked my luggage!?

Re: I wonder...

Of course they should. And this bill will pass at about the same time as the bill holding them liable.

Re: 1 second

Don't account for leap seconds and in a couple of years time you are 30+ seconds out which means that no TOTP system (like Google Authenticator, banking apps, etc.) will generate the right codes if they are using different clocks that do (e.g. in a smartphone).

No. FTA:

[Since 1972] To date, there have been 27 leap seconds added – when clocks show 23:59:60 rather than rolling over to 00:00:00 after 23:59:59. The other 10 seconds arrived as a bulk adjustment in 1972.

Even including the 10-second block in 1972, that's 37 seconds over 46 years, or 0.8 per year. Even if we round up to 1/year, it would take 30 years to be 30 seconds out. By then you're likely to have replaced any system you're using for OTP 3-6 times over.

Re: No

Didn't know it was a typo -- this was the first article I read on the device, and 800x1200, though in portrait mode, is a much more common resolution than 1800x1200.

However, my point still stands -- and is perhaps reinforced:

1. my 5-year old 8-inch tablet still has a higher resolution, and cost significantly less.

2. 1800x1200 is still not FHD, as a minimum horizontal resolution of 1920 is required for that.

This second point makes me think someone at Microsoft wanted to keep this product on-point and didn't want people looking to use it as a budget FHD media player, as it's suspiciously close to FHD.

Re: Thrown out? Or she should be jailed?

Ummm ...., you seem to have lost sight of the fact that if you are not found guilty you haven't broken the law.

That is entirely incorrect. Whether or not someone broke the law is dependent solely and entirely upon the intersection between their acts and activities proscribed by statutes.

Whether not someone is found guilty is dependent on an entirely different set of factors, including but not limited to:

a. the amount of evidence against them,

b. the amount of evidence they are successful in having invalidated,

c. their ability to fund a legal defense,

d. their influence in judicial and political circles.

Re: So for a while now...

The BSOD has been available for Linux since 1998:

https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/