Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
"Linux is not then an option in this case. The GUI is totally different to what he is presently using."
Browsing, email and basic office-y stuff is identical, the Linux update mechanism is faster and more reliable, and the number of threats to privacy and security is much lower. We don't know what his workload is, but I would guess that "totally different" is almost totally wrong.
If it isn't your house then it isn't personally identifiable as you. At least, not unless Google are way ahead on the AI and can understand your host welcoming you by name. When setting up the Assistant, you let it voice print you (presumably to redice the risk of visitors issuing random instructions as in the XKCD cartoon on this topic) so anyone else is just background noise.
So I don't think GDPR applies.
Also true for operating systems, office suites, web browsers, email clients...
The odd thing is that in all these other markets there is now a free alternative, but trying to put a free OS on your phone usually involves finding a bug that someone has turned into a rootkit.
"1 word is used to describe several different unrelated situations"
All real languages do that. Metaphor is fundamental to applying language to new situations. Computers as we know them did not exist 100 years ago so pretty much all computer jargon is metaphorical.
The argument here is just about which metaphors are allowed.
That would be the clients who did not realise that EITHER they have wasted their money on a product with no future OR it is not finished on delivery.
Decent products last long enough to see a version 2, which will cost the client a pretty penny if they have to pay for a rewrite of version 1 before they can start.
Ignoring the costs of future maintenance is like planning to fail. You wonder why people bother.
"Why _should_ this be different?"
Because a phone number is, by design, an open-ended sequence of digits (like a DNS name, though I think that, too, has a limit of 63 characters that hardly anyone runs into) whereas an IPv4 address is, by design, exactly four bytes.
Raw IPv4 has no such provision, but if the laggards are happy to paddle in lagoons behind a NAT (and to judge from this forum, they actually see that as a feature) then we can certainly design an internet that uses IPv6 for the heavy lifting (and routing) but hand-holds the ageing IPv4 boxrs and devices until they actually die of old age.
In fact, we did, and it is running. Measuring adoption by percentage traffic is the wrong metric. It has been fully adopted and your percentage merely tracks the rate at which old crap finally falls over and needs to be replaced.
IPv6 home routers: I'm using one right now. I've had two others over the last half decade. Perhaps you need to sign up with a competent ISP who, amongst other things, can point you at such a router or even supply you with one.
IPv6 has been up and running for years now. If you haven't noticed, it's because it works.
"Most applications don't need to ..."
I think that one is "citation needed" but even if it is true it is not relevant. If you have existing files, written by some other app, my malware can offer to do something helpful with them. That's quite a common pattern for utilities. They provide that little extra feature or capability that wasn't provided in the original app, or they bring together two apps to increase the value of both.
Of course, once the end-user has helpfully pointed me in the direction of some data that I know how to compromise (Thanks, end-user!) I can update it and "helpfully" introduce some vulnerability that my friends can exploit.
"their 1960s pre-network, timesharing model of "security" ..."
Don't hold your breath on that one. The fundamentals haven't changed. If you lose physical security, it's game over for the hardware. If you run un-trusted code, it's game over for that security context. Sadly, the solutions available haven't changed either. There's still no way to establish trust between two parties that know *nothing* about each other. Certificates are an attempt to provide *some* trustworthy background information, but the actually trustworthiness of the various CAs over the years has been patchy.
"A lot of HTML can also just be annoying by enabling massive messages that we don't really need or providing a method for the annoying mail designers to play with weird formatting, but those are not security risks."
Arguably the opposite, since you can be fairly sure that the content isn't worth reading and, with a bit of training, your anti-spam filter can learn this too.
"HTML email" is just a file transfer protocol, like HTTP, together with a way of combining several such files in a single package, like TAR or ZIP. Run a sufficiently buggy client and you can have trouble with all of these.
Most normal human beings appreciate being able to properly format their communications, and include relevant non-text bits and bobs. When, for example, was the last time you received a letter in the post that looked like it had been banged out on an actual typewriter starting from blank paper? If you are happy to shut off 99% of the human race, by all means stick to plain text email. We are probably happier to be shut off from you.
If HTML email did not exist, someone would invent it and it would rapidly grow in popularity until only weirdos insisted on avoiding it. Oh wait, that's exactly what happened.
But lines of code (unlike your paragraphs, which nevertheless I find quite readable at well over 80 characters per line) typically don't extend all the way to the right hand side and when they do it is usually really helpful to the reader to see that they are a single long line rather than two short ones.
I think it was more like 65 or 66 for FORTRAN programmers (upper-cased, since this *is* your grandmother's FORTRAN) since the first few columns were reserved for something as well -- statement labels for GO TO statements if I remember rightly. (In mitigation, FORTRAN ignored all whitespace, so you could save loads of characters that way.)
Anything that is compatible with CMD can only do things that an extended CMD could do. Once you've decided that you don't like some of the things CMD does, you might as well start from scratch. PS is much better than CMD once you've bitten the bullet and learned the syntax and, frankly, there are far worse languages out there.
Light paths are reversible. If you can see the target from the firing point, there is a "straight" path from the firing point to the target and you can find it with a weapons sight. It seems much more likely to me that the atmospheric conditions were simply spreading the beam out, so it was a modest circle rather than a pin-point when it arrived.
Your standard user account is a sandbox. Running as admin is a Bad Thing, remember?
The VM that your copy of Windows is running in is another sandbox.
So is the processor mode that Intel, blessings be unto their firstborn, have deigned to allow you to run the VMM in.
But yeah, one might reasonably ask why the sandboxes are nested so deeply.
I must be a mutant then. I have no trouble distinguishing between peopoe of other races who I know well, and great difficulty remembering faces (even pasty white ones like mine) of people I don't know well.
Your post sounds like one of those "Amazing Scientific Facts" that is so surprising when it is said out loud that everyone goes "Gosh, isn't science amazing!" rather than "Er, are you sure?". Soundbites trump skepticism every time, sadly.
" if he did, he would lose millions of voters, who would find a masked president unnerving. Seriously."
I believe you, but once the small minority of Americans who think that way have died of stupidity in the Second Wave, I think you'll find that the rest are perfectly capable of telling the difference between communism and public health measures.
The 8088 had the merit of existing when IBM needed manufacturing volumes of whatever they chose, so I don't think we should be too harsh on them for that decision.
As for segmentation, the 386 could have run a perfectly usable 32-bit platform with virtual DOS boxes for old software, in 1985. That's much less than 10 years after IBM's decision. If it actually took much longer before the world was free of 16-bit segments, it is because of much later decisions.
Code *that* old pre-dates source control, at least on the platform in question. So no, it certainly isn't a case of flickinh a switch on a repo, but it might be a question of actually finding the code at all. Possibly even typing it in from a faded and barely readable (and certainly not OCR-able) printout.
Wrong question, really. The issue is that you have end-users who don't want to "learn" LO, so you keep buying office because that is cheaper than the battle with the end-users, so you keep buying Windows because that is the only option.
Yes, we can all see how to break out of this tail-spin, but we aren't usually the ones making the purchasing decisions.
"The transition from 16-32 bit was way faster."
Really? The 386 was 1985. The first mass-market version of Windows that was truly 32-bit all the way through was Win2K, about 15 years later. *Intel*'s first AMD64 chip was the Pentium 4 (2000) and the first "consumer" edition of Windows that was available in 64-bit form is debatable. I ran XP64 quite happily, but others complained bitterly about the drivers. Vista had a 64-bit flavour, but does that really count as an OS? Let's pretend the first was Win7-64, which would have been less than a decade later.
But are we talking about the OS or the apps? You could run 32-bit apps on Windows 3.1, long before the 32-bit OS was widely available. In contrast, most of us are still running 32-bit apps on our 64-bit Windows editions.
I don't dispute the existence of two schools of thought, but I don't agree that "conservative" and "liberal" are the appropriate labels. Those two words have too many political connotations and I don't think the split in legal interpretation aligns with political leanings.
The opening paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_meaning_rule touches on this concept and links to notions like "literal rule", "textualism" and "originalism".
It's not just accidents. I'm pretty sure most sex crimes and violents assaults happen at home, too. Also, most such crimes are commited by heterosexuals. So ...
Force everyone to live in communes.
Take egg and sperm samples from all teenagers and then zap them.
Only breed from those samples after the donors have died and can be proven to have lived decent lives.
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