Re: Security
Like I said, I don't think it's actually a good idea. But it has shades of a good idea.
130 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Mar 2015
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.
"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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.