* Posts by gnasher729

2110 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Oct 2014

Apple's expert witness grilled by Epic over 'frictionless' spending outside the app

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: It shouldn't matter

Google will not be happy to you.

It’s not the choice between a Ford and the bus. According to Google, it’s the choice between a Ford and a BMW, according to me more the choice between a Ford and a Vauxhall.

Water's wet, the Pope's Catholic, and iOS is designed to stop folk switching to Android, Epic trial judge told

gnasher729 Silver badge

You can. Well, not right now, because Epic got themselves removed from the AppStore, but epic can sell whatever they want on their website without a penny going to apple, or they can sell things on Android without giving a penny to apple, and they can make it available to anyone they want.

Apple wants their cut _for things purchased on an iOS device_ and epic can make it available to anyone they want. And the app is free to download.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Computing 101 - one platform's software doesn't run on another

Since you ask… Apple sends a purchase receipt to your server. Your server needs to figure out that the same app on different devices is owned by the same user, so you make the in-app purchase available on all the customer’s devices. The only difference is that Apple helps you if the same user uses your app on multiple iOS devices; I hope Google does the same with android devices.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Pot calling Kettle

Absolutely. I worked with a product that was free to download, but needed a subscription to run on up to six devices. It didn’t matter where you bought the subscription (Mac, windows, iOS, android, or our website), and worked just fine.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: I thought this case was against Apple?

The reality is that iOS and Android are competitors and do what they can to compete. Too many people just confuse “competitive” and “anti-competitive”.

Compsci boffin publishes proof-of-concept code for 54-year-old zero-day in Universal Turing Machine

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: The illusion of absolute security

I remember 25 years ago when military liked a really primitive web server that could only be controlled from the keyboard connected to the computer it was running on. Security? The two guys with machine guns outside the server room.

NHS App gets go-ahead for vaccine passport use despite protest from privacy groups

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: China-bug

"With the vaccine you can still get the virus, but your body has a head-start on fighting it which means that the virus doesn't get a chance to establish itself."

That is correct. However, the first effect is that a large number of vaccinated people won't get Covid at all in a situation where someone who isn't vaccinated would. So if 100 people with / without vaccine come too close to someone with Covid, 10 people instead of 100 catch it, and those 10 will have on average less bad effects than the 100 and will on average spread the virus less than the 100, on top of the 90 that don't get Covid at all, have no health effects and don't spread anything

gnasher729 Silver badge

"It's worth stressing this is different from the COVID Tracing app abortively launched last year that knows about everyone you meet"

What the hell? Did you read _anything_ about how this works? COVID tracing doesn't know _anything_ about anyone you meet. It knows you were near a phone that used a random ID which changes every 15 minutes. It's impossible to find out which phone that was.

Nasdaq's 32-bit code can't handle Berkshire Hathaway's monster share price

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: HMRC

Double or extended precision is entirely appropriate - if you know what you’re doing. If you can estimate worst cases for rounding errors and compensate for them.

If you were nowhere near finished after reading “the first hundred lines” of code then they didn’t know what they were doing. And that would be the problem, not floating point.

gnasher729 Silver badge

I built a floating-point emulator that would perform Java-compatible FP on CPUs without FPU. Ran half the speed of a Pentium 3 FPU on the same processor. Took two weeks. And passed Sun’s tests. Really not difficult.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Use of floating point numbers ?

So how would you fix the problem. Pennies in integers? Explain to me why 33 +33+33 is not 100.

We were 'blindsided' by Epic's cheek, claims Apple exec on 4th day of antitrust wrangling

gnasher729 Silver badge

Jim, please. Epic can sell whatever they like on their website. Without giving a penny to Apple. Like Netflix does, and they are doing quite well. Or Amazon Prime, which is also doing quite well. If they sell on the AppStore, it’s apple’s terms.

East London council blurts thousands of residents' email addresses in To field blunder

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Apology accepted

It's a computer error. The computer's high voltage defences against incompetent users clearly failed

Can't get that printer to work? It's not you. It's that sodding cablin.... oh beautiful job with that cabling, boss

gnasher729 Silver badge

My personal Brother laser printer has two great features: 1. I found someone selling packs with two B/W and one of each color cartridges. 2. It doesn’t measure what’s in the cartridge but how many pages have been printed, and that counter can be reset.

So what if I pay peanuts for my home broadband? I demand you fix it NOW!

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Fun with BT....

To say something positive I found amazing…

So my download speed went down to 150kbit per second. Still working, but really slow. I tried to call them, but my phone want working! Eventually they came to my home and found that one of the two wires to my home was cut. Ends still close together, but separate. No wonder my phone wasn’t working. But broadband still managed 150kbit per second over a broken cable! I found that massively impressive.

BadAlloc: Microsoft looked at memory allocation code in tons of devices and found this one common security flaw

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: fix

And then comes your optimising compiler, concludes that sz + x < sz is only possible in the case of overflow which is undefined behaviour, therefore it can't happen, and it throws the test out.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Need trapping

Swift traps integer overflows, unless you explicitly tell it not to. So a + b will trap on overflow, taking the application down reliably, a &+ b will add without overflow check; I think it's defined to wrap around. The optimiser seems to be quite good at avoiding checks that are not needed; for example a + b in a loop with the same values a and b will only check once.

Spotlight on Apple, Google app stores: What happened to Tile, Spotify, Match – and that proposed law in Arizona

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: "App stores are natural monopolies"

"Quite. The app stores should have a fee structure similar in size to a payment processor such as Visa and MasterCard."

But they are not payment processors. For example, Apple pays the complete cost of hosting free apps. Apple provides services to all apps. When you get notifications while the app is not running, that's because Apple is sending them to your phone through the phone network. And lots of other things.

Apple's macOS Gatekeeper asleep on the job: Exploited flaw put users 'at grave risk' of malware infection

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Mavericks

The number of big cats is quite limited, and they would have run out by now. They already used the complete Wikipedia list of "Big Cats", plus "Mountain Lion" which is not on that list.

UK.gov wants mobile makers to declare death dates for their new devices from launch

gnasher729 Silver badge

Sale of Goods Act says that after 6 years in the UK all your rights against the seller (you have no rights against the manufacturer anyway) disappear, and you're on your own, even if it is the seller's fault. It's the limit. The time when the seller can say "I don't know you, go away".

That doesn't mean you have many rights after say two years. For example no rights to have defects fixed even after two years for many items. What the six years mean for example that if your phone breaks down after 23 months on a two year trip to Australia (within the two years), you can go to a store there, have them write down what is wrong and when, and two years later back in the UK they have to fix it.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Force open source instead

"Once a product stops being supported, last update should unlock any protection that stops 3rd party OS's being installed, many a good phone or tablet has plenty of life left in them."

So when my phone isn't supported anymore, the manufacturer issues a kill switch that opens my phone up to attacks from any hackers, basically forcing me to stop using it? Think about what you're asking for. "Stops being supported" doesn't mean "stops working".

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Force open source instead

"Instead of publishing a death date, force the manufacturer to publish the OS as open source, so we don't have to toss a good device into the landfill"

There are two things I don't understand. The first is, how would you justify the government stealing a manufacturer's OS code? The second is, how would having an open source OS stop a good device from being tossed into the landfill?

Wouldn't recycling and making long living devices be much better?

Harassers and bullies succeed in tech because silence is encouraged

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Rednecks incoming.....

Seriously, you are saying that your son that you are so proud of us an uncontrollable killer? Tony, you managed the almost impossible: Being more disgusting than the anonymous red neck.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: "Harassers and bullies succeed in tech..."

"A male colleague exposed himself to a female colleague."

There are many, many reasons why you would want to get rid of them instantly that have nothing to do with sexual harassment whatsoever. Like you can expect him to sue the company if any dangly bits get caught in the vacuum cleaner. Or for general hygienic reasons. I would go ballistic if I found out he planted his naked backside on my desk, or my chair.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Rednecks incoming.....

"Woke" comes in two variants: The one where "woke" actually just means "being a decent human being who cares about the people around them", which is obviously a major problem to the holes surrounding them. And the "look I'm woke" brigade, which is actually a tiny minority.

BTW. "Narrative" is one of the words that let you immediately recognise a brain-washed individual. Like "MSM", mentioning "Bill Gates" is also often a sign.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: "non-disparagement clauses in many employment contracts"?

I'd say that if you tell the truth (and not just literally the truth but in a way that nobody will draw wrong conclusions from what you say), then _you_ are not disparaging anyone. Sure, it's possible that a company might disparage itself by its actions, but that's not your fault.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: "Harassers and bullies succeed in tech..."

I must have been very lucky. I've worked in companies from $5bn market caps to startups with three employees, and I haven't seen any case where bullying or sexual harassment was accepted. All software companies with women being a small minority, but fortunately with (mentally) adult co-workers who would behave as decent people, always several people who would be protective if needed, but also several women where you wouldn't be protective but get out the popcorn and watch an attempting harasser being thoroughly destroyed :-)

And one case where someone with an unacceptable attitude that he wasn't willing to change is not with the company anymore, since our very non-woke boss has this attitude that everyone should be able to enjoy coming to work every day.

Reddit's ousted Ellen Pao abandons Silicon Valley sexism sueball

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Interesting last paragraph

"I am surprised that the judge allowed that level of jury-rigging. Did her council contested that and if so what was the answer?"

You are basing this solely on what the plaintiff claimed. The plaintiff is unlikely to be unbiased here, and the real situation is likely just a little bit different.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Interesting last paragraph

What "rounded images" patent? Are you talking about the Bill Atkinson patent that allowed having view with rounded corners are arbitrary shapes to be drawn efficiently? Which IMO was a very well-deserved patent, easily worked around (in a slightly less efficient way), and completely irrelevant today with modern graphics hardware.

FSF doubles down on Richard Stallman's return: Sure, he is 'troubling for some' but we need him, says org

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Offensive

If you want to represent an organisation like FSF what you say counts and nobody should care what you do.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Epstein is beyond critics, and Minsky hasn’t done anything wrong. The problem is Stallman saying that it’s all not a big deal. If he had said “I’m sure this didn’t happen”, fine. But he said “so what if she was too young, she knew what she was doing”.

FreeBSD gives ARM64 green light for production over x86 alternative's 'growth trajectory'

gnasher729 Silver badge

Just need to know: What is PC98?

We have never given census data to anyone – not even the spy agencies, says the UK's Office for National Statistics

gnasher729 Silver badge

From a discussion I read on a non-UK census: Politician says: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". Other person: "I thought the idea with a census was that _if_ you have something to hide, you have nothing to fear".

It should be obvious to everyone, even a politician, that having correct information about the population is very valuable. And we can only get correct information about everyone if it is guaranteed that this correct information, which might hurt someone, is guaranteed to not ever get into the wrong hands.

I would make a strong suggestion that MI5 for example should put some request for information to the Office for National Statistics, that the office refuses it, and then gets all newspapers to print the story. Together with all the background given here.

A floppy filled with software worth thousands of francs: Techie can't take it, customs won't keep it. What to do?

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Even in the 1980's

Points for using an Atari computer? At my university, I wrote the software so that you could edit Fortran programs on our 6 MHz Z80 based CPM system and then that system would _pretend_ to type it at maximum speed into a terminal for our CSC Cyber 175.

Red Hat pulls Free Software Foundation funding over Richard Stallman's return

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Let's be very clear here ...

“Say that to my face” is usually interpreted as “say that to my face standing in front of me, in reach of my fists”. Which you clearly didn’t.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: And: F.U.D.

That wasn’t hints. That was my opinion about the guy. He has 40 years of history and I’m old enough to remember some of it.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Achievements of Richard Stallman

There is a difference between implementing an OS and being one of the little helpers writing down a spec.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Achievements of Richard Stallman

You’re making it worse. Neither of them invented Unicode. You were thinking about utf-8 which is an encoding of Unicode code points, easily described in ten lines and implemented in ten lines of code. You are so infatuated with Stallman, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Achievements of Richard Stallman

Stallman didn’t write Posix. He was on a committee creating the Posix standard.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Achievements of Richard Stallman

Stallman didn’t write Posix. Stallman was a member of a committee that wrote the Posix standard.

gnasher729 Silver badge

There’s very little left of khtml in webkit.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Apple cannot print without gnu licensed printer software: Apple is the copyright holder of that software. So say “thank you Apple” when you use it on a non-Apple device.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Achievements of Richard Stallman

Ken Thompson calls you a liar as far as UTF-8 is concerned. Stallman wrote a primitive first version of the C pre-processor which shouldn’t take a decent developer more than a week. I don’t care about emacs. But I’m sure that I wouldn’t leave my granddaughters alone with him (not what you think, they would _hurt_ him if he tried anything).

gnasher729 Silver badge

Apple was built on various Pascal compilers, several third party C compilers, Metroworks compilers, MPW. gcc was used for a very short time and they invested lots of money to replace it with something free and better in the form of Clang. So “Apple is based on Open Source software” is quite rubbish. Stallman is actually mainly responsible for Apples switch to Clang.

Apple iPad torched this guy's home, lawsuit claims

gnasher729 Silver badge

Well, in Apple’s position I would require in discovery to see a list of everything the home owner bought on Amazon and eBay and see if there were any chargers and charging cables.

Yes, there's nothing quite like braving the M4 into London on the eve of a bank holiday just to eject a non-bootable floppy

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Teachers

What I learned is that teachers are by profession always right. And if they are not right, then in countries like the UK they are right because they have the authority. Except obviously they are not. My teachers (not in the UK) knew that with 17 year olds there was just a chance that sometimes a pupil would know better, so “I’m right because I say so” wasn’t happening that much.

Bell Labs transfers copyright of influential ‘Plan 9’ OS to new foundation

gnasher729 Silver badge

"Look at how the mainstream OSs have mushroomed in size."

It depends on what you call "OS". Look at MacOS. What I would call "OS" (the Darwin kernel) is actually tiny. And then there's tons and tons and tons and more tons of software written around it. If Apple decided to replace Darwin with Plan 9, you wouldn't see any difference at all.

Glibc 'abortion joke' diff tiff leaves Richard Stallman miffed

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Wait, what?

Funny jokes are funny. Stallman is deeply unfunny. I think they should change the documentation to “unfunny ‘joke’ by Richard Stallman removed”.

I’m sure he won’t resign again, so they need to do something else to get rid of him.

Ministry of Defence tells contractors not to answer certain UK census questions over security fears

gnasher729 Silver badge

To be honest, the census people should keep all the information in your census secret, and the MoD shouldn't trust them to do that, so their advice is totally right. Now where does that leave us if we don't work for the MoD... Same. The census people should keep everything in your census secret, and you shouldn't trust them. As one politician said: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" with the reply "I thought the rule for the census was if you _have_ something to hide you have nothing to fear".

Australian police suggests app to record consent to sexual activity

gnasher729 Silver badge

Pulling out an app is really off putting. And it doesn’t help with people changing their minds especially when they find out that their ideas of enjoyable sex are not the same.