Posts by DropBear

Re: Is it real or is it Bluecoat?

It's all an artefact of the (sadly very popular nowadays) line of thinking according to which horrible things are only evil when "bad guys" do them - the arbitrarily defined "good guys" are a-ok to murder kittens, "it's for the greater good"...

Re: Book ciphers/one off messages

"And if a computer can encode it, another computer can break it."

It does not follow at all. If you point your computer at some sort of electronic equivalent of the book cipher, it's still unbreakable unless Eve figures out what the "book" is...

"50:50 split, I you can bet that they are all look like models"

And I bet the last remaining male angling to pair up with the last remaining female would still get the "not even if you were the last man..." speech.

Re: Too early to tell.

"we call this process "science"."

Except saying "a wizard did it!" is not exactly science - and for all intents and purposes dark matter and energy are pretty much the equivalent of that. Something that we basically seem to know nothing at all about, introduced arbitrarily solely to handwave a problem away. And _IF_ that is not so, then I have to say scientists did a piss-poor job of communicating to the rest of us why those concepts might make perfectly good sense for a large number of different reasons that seem to support each other, if such a thing exists. Because otherwise it sure as hell looks like all that dark stuff is just "something we made up to make 1+1 = -5 work even though it doesn't"...

""Some people here are just crazy."

Wish I could downvote more than once, what a dick."

Oh, that's just how some people spell "there's exactly two ways to think, my way and the wrong way..."

Re: "This doesn't mean the nagware is working:"

Believe it or not I can walk into most any PC-selling outfit around here (well, not that there are that many left but still) and in pretty much any of them I can get a Pc with... FreeDOS. I don't think I need to explain no sane person from either side of the counter expects that to remain the OS of that PC - it's just there so that there's some difference between that PC and a brick when the power button is pushed...

Re: Uninteresting, but simple test...

"Surely the simplest is to use a mobile broadband dongle and disable the Windows firewall? Then the system becomes a node on the Internet with all ports potentially open - assuming no carrier NAT..."

That's a mighty bold assumption. With the industrial amount of these things in existence at each carrier and the existing IPv4 shortage, do you seriously think they just give you a routable IP for each one of those...? Out of curiosity, I just switched my WiFi off - and my IP immediately jumped to a "local" 10.x.x.x one...

Huh? "Reinstall"...? From what?!? No laptop I have seen in the last decade came with any sort of installation media...

Re: IBM vs. Microsoft way of thinking...

"There are two ways of constructing a software design"

No, not anymore. Just one: infuriatingly complex. Complexity is unavoidable and outright required today - it's just an unavoidable consequence of progress in the field and in corresponding expectations. While at some point "text" meant "ASCII printable" these days not handling any intricacy of UTF-8 (or is UTF-16? Which order, and with or without BOM? Right-to-left or left-to-right?) is unthinkable. While at some point "retrieving data" meant reading bytes from a file, these day probably means yanking a video stream out of a remote database. Not much can be done about that, the cat is not going to go back into the bag. The problem is that our tools to abstract, encapsulate, and reuse that complexity in a _confidently predictable_, _verifiably and inherently safe_ way are either piss poor or they don't exist at all.

It's the equivalent of being given a set of lego bricks where no two bricks have the same shape (and definitely no two bricks use the same connector) then being expected to build something really large out of it just as one would with a proper set of bricks. No wonder it just doesn't happen, and it just can't happen - not until we come up with some entirely different paradigm to program that makes that complexity reducible to a level we can handle (or tools that can reliably manipulate and verify it for us to an arbitrary degree). At any rate, as long as we keep trying to manhandle ever bigger juggernauts cobbled together from bits of C/C++ and the like, nothing whatsoever will change - segfaults, crashes, security flaws, all of it is here to stay until we come up with something adequate for our current level of ambitions...

Re: Been that way fror a long time in the US of A

"Doesn't really matter what language you're taught. The important bit is to understand structures and logic."

Well, no. Programming doesn't happen in a vacuum just as a train doesn't go anywhere without a rail. And once you have those rails tightly nailed to the railroad ties, it's going to take considerable time and effort to rip them up and move them somewhere else, so you might want to give some consideration to where you want them laid in the first place. And no amount of wishful thinking will make an all-terrain Humvee out of a train.

Re: The Glastonbury Module

Nope. "Blimpy McBlimpface". Or, at the very least, "Stay Puft!"...