Posts by stephanh

strings

Old trick of using Unix "strings" on MS Word .doc files. Often showed deleted content!

I have also used Vim to edit "locked" sections in Word documents

Re: Two thousand million or so years ago...

I think that was based on the now-outdated idea that planet formation was caused by two stars passing close by.

The same concept is also present in Stapledon's "Star Maker".

Colonists also engaged in scalping. Bounties were paid for indian scalps.

Basically human history is drenched in blood, and nobody can claim the moral high ground.

Re: Actually...

"...it is easier to get an Mac to boot Linux than it is to get a PC to do the same."

Not in my experience. Especially if you don't just want to boot, but also use all the $$$ hardware in your shiny machine. And assuming you took some care in selecting the PC.

Re: It's not "browsing" anymore..

This means that things like router configuration webpages will be marked as "insecure".

It would be more reasonable to exclude 10.x.x.x and 192.168.x.x from this, but apparently Google decided otherwise.

Re: Java off, and on

You turned Java "off" on your iPhone?

You probably should have turned Flash off too, then. And Silverlight.

Re: Here's a thought...

"Would it not be simply better to devise a translation table to trap and refuse to register names in Cyrillic that "look like" anything in Latin?"

The Unicode consortium maintains tables of characters which are "confusable", and an algorithm to check if two strings are confusable.

https://unicode.org/cldr/utility/confusables.jsp

Arguably, the way URLs work could be changed to declare that two URLs which are "confusable" are actually the same. This could be done by normalizing to a single representation under the hood (Unicode calls this the "skeleton").

Current proposed solutions are all about somehow fixing this in the client by some heuristics which should make the browser complain in certain cases. Frankly I don't think that scales.

algorithm

"This is a forum where an appreciation of the meaning of 'algorithm' ought to be a given!"

Normally the word "algorithm" is used to imply some at least mildly nontrivial computation is going on.

Ignoring N pixels is not what I would call an algorithm.

Re: This is known as:

Just like all issues with Unix file permissions can be solved with

chmod 777

, all issues with X11 display permissions can be solved with

xhost +

Re: In perspective, Galileo isn't important

"The EU later joined Galileo and changed the participation requirements so only EU members can have access to high precision positioning. Why did lawyers representing the original participants accept this?"

May I suggest the UK fire a nuke at the nefarious country which was responsible for this change? It would only require a very short-range rocket.

Re: systemd-free?

Yes, it's possible to get Debian to work without systemd. That is not the point. The point is that if you do that, and some package breaks, is that considered a bug in the package? For Debian, the answer is currently "no" and for Devuan it is "yes".

The point of "init freedom" is that Devuan has *multiple* supported init's, and packages are supposed to work with all of them, and if they don't, that is considered a bug and not a WONTFIX,.

Re: And in other news ...

"I hear chroot still works, though."

Probably easier today to use a Docker container.

Re: Ivory tower IT

"meet the real world of personal data scattered in Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, pdfs and for all I know coded into C# objects."

If that is how a company handles personal data, they will soon meet the real world of massive GDPR fines.

That why the more forward-looking organizations have spent the last two years changing from the "real world" you sketched to a world in which GDPR compliance is actually possible.

Re: If it were anyone other than Google who bought Android, Inc...

"Android has been pretty terrible until recently???"

I'd say it was pretty terrible until version 4. Speaking as ex- Froyo user.

Re: Upvoting own posts

Don't bother upvoting your own posts.

Use these chaps instead: http://clickmonkeys.com/

"As long as you remain a customer of Click Monkeys!!™ we'll never tell!!" So what could possibly go wrong?

This story shall the good man teach his son

"Of course, that's the French commemorating a battle, quietly forgetting the fact that they went on to lose the war,..."

Mmm, "Agincourt",.. OK, history class, who won the Hundred Years' War?

Re: I don't understand...

...and then you tested all packages and fixed the ones which are now broken?

Re: "From which it follows that the docs were unclear. "

"Linux code copied from Windows ?

Non-GPL copied from Linux code ?"

Both copied from BSD? Windows has used code from BSD for networking, not so far-fetched to think that they also look there for "inspiration" on other topics.

Re: "Our mission is to make Windows the best dev box for you"

"Can you do that on any other type of Linux install? Didn't think so."

I do this (invoking Windows programs) all the time from msys2 bash. Virtualbox also has guest extensions to allow a guest to invoke pograms on the host. (Disabled by default, of course.)

Re: Caveat Emptor

Lynch first tried to sell Autonomy to a little old lady, but she smelled a rat. So he had to find somebody a bit more gullible.

Re: RISC-V is the future

I am sympathetic to RISC-V but I suspect that Qualcomm is only involved to keep ARM licensing down.

Re: The right thing to do.

In Dutch we have the joke word hottentottententententoonstellingsterrein: exhibition terrain for "Hottentot" (Khoikhoi people) tents.

Never mind that Khoikhoi don't live in tents.

But merely mentioning a trademarked name is in itself not a problem. The problem is in *naming* some product after the trademark.

Somebody at Oracle's law firm did a grep over an easily-available list of software products, thereby satisfying some minimal level of "policing" effort so as not to lose the trademark.

In particular Netflix has apparently strongly lobbied for EME (Encrypted Media Extensions).

Re: No need for virtual machines....

Apple has already a different solution in place for that: universal binaries, which may contain machine code for different architectures.

LLVM bitcode isn't architecture-independent anyway; I cannot take LLVM bitcode compiled for x86 and use it on ARM.

Uhm, does this make WSL not in fact in violation of the GPL?

Perhaps for the generic Unix APIs, Microsoft may be covered by contracts from their Xenix days, but there are tons of Linux-specific APIs such as clone() and futex() and inotify and epoll which almost any Linux program will be using.

"If Microsoft were to roll out decent ssh client and server integration for its products that would be a big win for its customers,"

Windows 10 now contains a build-in ssh server. I learned this because it got in a fight with my openssh install for port 22.

"although the devil would, as always, be in the details."

Ah yes.

Re: Theory and in practice?

I propose the kilometer per second per megaparsec which, as we learned the other day, is used to express the Hubble non-constant. It's about 30 zeptoherz.

Re: KISS principle, we hardly knew you

@tfb

"But in fact what it should really be possible to do is to send a bunch of stuff to the browser which says 'if ambient light is in range x do y; if it is in z do q ...'"

You can do exactly that already using the light-level media query in CSS, it lets you say: use this style if light level is low, use this style if light level is high. No need for Javascript.

Unfortunately it can still be used to glean information, e.g. by having a 1x1 pixel image which is shown in dark conditions and another one which is shown in light conditions, and then tracking on the server which is requested.

Re: Emojis... where's the one for *vomit* ?

"The post contains some characters we can’t support."

Suggest changing it to

"The post contains some characters we can’t condone."

\U0001F60B

Re: Manufacturers are spending more

"Except for "kilo", which gets lowercase "k" just to confuse people."

And hecto (h) and deca (da) are also lowercase.