* Posts by James Cane

130 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Mar 2015

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UH OH: Windows 10 will share your Wi-Fi key with your friends' friends

James Cane

Re: Security

Like I said, I don't think it's actually a good idea. But it has shades of a good idea.

James Cane

Security

A small part of me has often thought that all networks should be completely open access. No firewalls. No WPA.

It would make us all take security much more seriously. If you have a sensitive application running on your network, encrypt and authenticate.

Of course, I don't actually think this is a good idea. But I think it has shades of a good idea.

UK TV is getting worse as younglings shun the BBC et al, says Ofcom

James Cane

Re: I watch almost no TV

I would pay more: if the license fee went up, I would pay it and I wouldn't complain. I'm not paying your license fee for you, as that would simply let you off the hook and would result in a zero-sum game.

Your move.

James Cane

I watch almost no TV

And what little I do watch is mostly on a laptop.

But I'm more than happy to pay the license fee.

It's a bargain. I'd pay it - and more - just for Radio 4. Then there's the BBC news outfit which remains the best in the world, and free of commercial interference.

James Cane

Radio 4

I would gladly pay the entire cost of the license fee every year (and more) just to keep Radio 4 going.

Boffin: Will I soon be able to CLONE a WOOLLY MAMMOTH? YES. Should I? Hell NO

James Cane

Re: I'm alive!

"Its surrogate mother (cousin elephas maximus) will have perfectly current immunity"

Exactly. I do wonder if people think that cloned animals are grown in vats or something.

James Cane

Re: I'm alive!

In mammals, immunity to specific diseases is acquired not inherited. And anyway, vets.

ONE MILLION new lines of code hit Linux Kernel

James Cane

Re: wait for it...

"The "improved" boot times of Windows 8(.1) is actually one of the biggest pieces of carp introduced, leaving you without a sane way of interrupting a failing boot in order to get into safe mode and try to fix whatever an update has botched..."

Millions of users get a powerful real-world improvement, but a few tech support people have a slightly harder time and you think it's a big piece of "carp"?

F# earns Syme top Royal Academy of Engineering award

James Cane

Re: "Out of curiosity, is there a business benefit or are you doing it on your own time?"

I'm a developer, not a manager.

What you say is not universally true. It's only true if the costs of a rewrite are lower than the projected savings and if those savings actually materialise, which they frequently fail to do.

Furthermore, there's an opportunity cost - all the time you're re-writing the existing system, you're not building value.

James Cane

Out of curiosity, is there a business benefit or are you doing it on your own time?

</snark>

Windows 7 and 8.1 market share surge, XP falls behind OS X

James Cane

Momentous

This will go down as the month that Linux on the desktop almost overtook Vista.

James Cane

Re: Well as usually those statistics must be taken with a _lot_ of salt

Technical people often massively underestimate the size of the non-technical population. People who fiddle with their computer's settings in any way at all are a minority.

Microsoft: Stop using Microsoft Silverlight. (Everyone else has)

James Cane

Re: NHS

I'm just trying to imagine the meeting where they decided that getting BT to write critical NHS software was a smart move. Maybe they'd already started on that beer.

Microsoft in Blighty reveals its 78 THOUSAND POUND Surface 3 slabloid

James Cane

Slow news day?

Or are we just bored?

Who wants a classic ThinkPad with whizzy new hardware? Lenovo would just love to know

James Cane

Re: @James, (2)

True blue Brit here!

James Cane

Re: @James...

Also, if you order without a 3G modem then the T440S ships with an empty 42mm M.2 port which will accept an SSD.

James Cane

Re: @James...

No worries, @hadow..

Can confirm, T440S absolutely definitely does have gigabit LAN. Have just opened up the adapter properties of mine and confirmed it.

I'm a front office investment banking developer, .Net client and server, and in daily use the machine is surprisingly powerful. I'd love a quad core chip too, but sadly not an option. For the weight and size of the machine, however, I'm really very happy with it.

My job requires a lot of international travel and I appreciate not having to lug around a huge lump. The machine will also last >10 hours on a charge in the real world which is fantastic, at least it will with the extended battery, which I have. You can get more powerful machines but they come with a weight penalty.

Also, the battery is hot-swappable. There are two batteries: a small internal one and a larger one on the back, which it uses first. You can take out the larger battery and replace it (it just clips on) without even shutting down the machine.

James Cane

Re: vga

Mini displayport to VGA adaptor weighs about 5 grams and is basically just a very short cable, so hardly takes any space in your bag either.

James Cane

Re: Appart from what's beeing said

I care about laptop thickness. I carry mine in a rucksack at the back and the thinner it is, the more room I have left.

James Cane

Re: I'm gonna get flamed for this...

Aha!

My (second-hand) Audi does that thing with the rear wiper. I always assumed it was a fault. Cool, now I understand :)

James Cane

Oh, I should add - having checked - that it actually does have gigabit ethernet.

James Cane

Re: ames Cane, What's wrong with the current range?

Couldn't comment, as I don't need it. 12 gigs of RAM is enough for me, as is 100MBit ethernet. Maybe there is a machine wih those specs? It's a big range.

But more to the point, all that stuff is about internal specs, not external "retro" styling. What makes you think the retro machine will have what you need?

Edit: just checked my machine. The ethernet port is gigabit.

James Cane

Re: I'd buy one

Henry Wertz, complaining about Microsoft... kinda 2004 isn't it? They're hardly the whale among minnows that once they were.

James Cane

What's wrong with the current range?

My T440s with the extended 6 cell battery lasts basically forever on a charge, has an outstanding keyboard and build quality, and is reasonably light and thin. What's more, it has a trackpad that is almost (not quite) as good as an Apple trackpad and one of those button thingummies for those who can't get on with trackpads. It has plenty of ports, 12 gigs of RAM and a massive SSD. It also doesn't have spurious annoying status lights everywhere and is actually - in a businessy kind of a way - a bit of a looker.

.

China's best phone yet: Huawei P8 5.2-inch money-saving Android smartie

James Cane

Good hardware

But sadly it doesn't run iOS.

Britain beats back Argies over Falklands online land grab

James Cane

Illogical

Can't Argentina just apply for a second alternative TLD for the "Malvinas" and open it up to any business or individual who wants it?

Or do they not understand how the internet works?

We forget NOTHING, the Beeb thunders at Europe

James Cane

Re: Massive coincidence

What people don't seem to get about this is that the links aren't removed from Google completely.

They only don't show up in conjunction with specific keywords, usually the name of the person requesting the takedown.

James Cane

Massive coincidence

I randomly clicked a link in the BBC's list, about halfway down, and the article was about somebody I know personally (and reasonably well). Crazy. What are the odds?

I can understand why she wanted to have the search delisted under her name - she was interviewed briefly and mentioned by name about a medical condition she had a decade ago which is no longer relevant to her life, but which would conceivably hurt her employment chances.

Tesla says Model 3 is still on schedule, despite being delayed again

James Cane

Re: Annoying fan boys...

And it's not a Tesla e-car. It's just a car. Where did you get "e-car" from?

James Cane

Re: Annoying fan boys...

Also, I know it's a cliche, but read this. Seriously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Besides, none of the current Tesla models practically pay for themselves. They are premium cars and are cost-effective within that context only.

Most of the people saying things like that, as far as I can see, are actual Tesla owners who appear to have forgotten their massive capital outlay (easy to do if you're very wealthy).

James Cane

Re: Annoying fan boys...

The internet is full of people who are hypocrites. Your point?

James Cane

Re: Out of curiosity ...

There's plenty of lithium available. Reserve estimates vary wildly (current lithium demand is too low to warrant much investment in exploring new resources), but it's generally accepted that there's enough to build car batteries for at least a century.

Not to mention that lithium ion batteries are extremely easy to recycle (and in the case of car disposal, very likely to actually be recycled as there's profit in it).

Lithium isn't also particularly nasty to mine. A lot is extracted from brine pools, or using water. Most of the rest is mined from rock deposits in a manner similar to other ores. Lithium is also not particularly toxic or environmentally problematic.

James Cane

Re: It'll be delayed again

We are closer to making batteries cheaper. That's the whole point of the so-called "Gigafactory". The sheer scale of the thing makes that inevitable.

D-Wave promises chip that could search the whole universe

James Cane

Re: The true test.

It'll finish every level with a perfect score in every possible way simultaneously.

Still won't manage to do it on very high quality though.

Killer ChAraCter HOSES almost all versions of Reader, Windows

James Cane

Re: C @James Cane

Of course it wouldn't guarantee total safety. What does? This argument is like saying that you shouldn't put railings on bridges because it's still possible to fall over.

Not using C would provide a much higher level of comfort. Of course, we have a legacy code issue and that's not going away.

I agree that efficient code is worth striving for, but in this day and age, secure code is far more important than getting every last drop of performance. I'm not suggesting we suddenly go to Javascript, just that it's a shame that the C language spec never included strings.

James Cane

Re: C

I'm not saying anything about whether the aircraft industry should or shouldn't use C. I was making an analogy. Addressing the meta-problem, if you like.

I'm saying that the aircraft industry has an approach to safety which assumes that people are flawed and that mistakes happen, and the best approach to safety is to treat human fallibility as an engineering problem.

The software industry has an approach to safety which assumes that engineers are daredevil heroes, and the answer comes from individual developers "doing the right thing". This clearly fails.

I don't have a problem with C in general, but the string handling is such a massive issue. It's not a small thing - it's huge. Almost all of the code vulnerabilities that are found and exploited come from this one thing. Not quite all of them, but pretty damned close.

James Cane

Re: C

Or to put it another way, what you say is both totally correct and completely missing the point.

James Cane

Re: C

Dude, I know how to use strings in C. But your argument essentially boils down to security through trust, rather than security through engineering. And hence we find ourselves in the mess we're in.

It's all very well to say that you shouldn't be writing kernel code if you're not good enough, but the fact is that clearly that doesn't happen in real life. Partly because Windows has a driver model which often requires kernel code to be written by third parties, but mostly because human beings are human beings.

If the aircraft industry had this approach to safety, planes would fall out of the sky. The trick with safety is to recognise when a policy isn't working and change it. The policy of trusting developers to be good and never make mistakes isn't working.

James Cane

C

Yet another vulnerability caused by the p1ss-poor design of C. Specifically, its total ineptitude in dealing with strings.

I do wonder how much more secure the world's computing infrastructure would be if C had been given a strong string type from the beginning.

This whopping 16-bit computer processor is being built by hand, transistor by transistor

James Cane

Actually yes, if you give it access to a large enough persistent data store and spent the time writing a PC emulator for it.

The speed wouldn't be much to write home about - we'd be talking about one frame every few thousand years I reckon - and there'd be no visual display on a monitor. But yes, in principle, it could.

James Cane

Digital switch?

Um, aren't most switches digital? Do you mean electronic?

James Cane

Re: I must be the only software guy here

I'm a software guy too and this is high art.

Software doesn't really exist. Everything is hardware. Software guys should remember that more often.

James Cane

Re: Hand Made Vacuum Tubes by Claude Paillard

Thank you. That was 12 minutes well spent.

Ubuntu daddy Mark Shuttleworth loses fight to cancel $20m bank fee

James Cane
Alert

Holy Sh1t!

The Superior Ink building's website is listing just one apartment for sale at the moment.

1 bedroom, 855 square feet, $3.15 MILLION.

Firefox preps processor revamp under Project Electrolysis

James Cane

Re: @James Cane

Nope. That helps, but it's not enough. It got a huge reputation for speed and simplicity in the early days.

James Cane

Re: @James Cane

No, I don't "want" anything. I'm reasonably happy to use Chrome or Safari.

I just think it's a loss to the wider world that Firefox seems happy to continue its slip into obscurity. The borg browser has become the borg browser, in part, because it provides a better user experience for the masses. And it's the masses who matter in this race, whether you want them to or not.

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