Posts by 9Rune5

Re: Website on https/SSL <> "secure"

The GET request, when accessing a https resource, flows over the encrypted stream. You need a man-in-the-middle (whose certificate you trust) to decode the stream and sniff out the URL for real-time surveillance to succeed.

If you keep an eye on your certs as you watch the next batch of videos featuring kittens, you should be reasonably safe. Login or not should not matter as long as the site uses relative paths or makes sure every link is prefixed with https://.

TL;DR: access youtu.be yourself and check how much content you get that doesn't flow over a https connection. Run Wireshark to inspect the packets.

Re: Boils...

"On my main W7 machines, which are W10 compliant - no nagging, no surreptitious downloads, no misleading dialogs, nothing! And all with absolutely minimum effort from me. What am I doing wrong?"

Ditto. I was running W7 Ultimate. I suspect Ultimate -> Pro is considered a downgrade, so hence no nagging.

I still upgraded a couple of weeks ago. On my 6 year old i7 system, the upgrade went smoothly. My wife's Lenovo laptop: Smooth sailing. My previous work Dell laptop (which my son will inherit as soon as he stops hitting everything in sight) took a clean W10 install without a hitch (MS has a utility someplace that lets people put W10 on a USB stick and do a clean installation).

No questions about BIOS updates or anything. I did struggle to enable Bitlocker on my new Dell laptop, but eventually something clicked and it just worked.

My original plan was to upgrade my main computer and _then_ perform a clean W10 installation, but I haven't moved to our new home yet, so I am delaying the upgrade (shipping a 20kg computer might break something, so let us see what breaks first before we buy new stuff, right?). Hence the W7 -> W10 upgrade (which skips no less than two versions of Windows...!).

Re: More Information

Thorium and even uranium would be the rational response indeed.

Too bad most of our fellow human beings are not rational creatures. Greenpeace & friends have spent decades convincing every man and his dog that nuclear energy is bad (m'kay).

Obviously Bob got in early on the development of alternatives to 'classic capitalism'. Certainly, if you shove sufficient amounts of money to enough dictators, eventually some of that money will reach the poor. Simples.

Re: Windows8.2=10 is a fraud and a scam!

"But you should expect to pay for the creation of the various drivers and other development effort that ensured the same OS will work exactly the same on a totally different piece of hardware"

I did pay for that when I bought the hardware in question. Intel wrote the chipset drivers, the motherboard OEM then licensed Intel's drivers and presto... Even older versions of Windows just works.

MS eventually took it upon themselves to distribute the drivers in question (WHQL approved drivers are channeled through Windows Update). Good for them. Doesn't change a thing when it comes to the payment/license model.

Last time I read about MS' license model (back when XP was released I think), the idea was that you could change a number of major hardware components without triggering a re-activation (which had to be done by phone). I expect/hope that is still the case.

FWLIW: I upgraded my 6 year old i7-based rig last week. I was a bit worried, because my Win7 install had never even raised the topic of "Windows 10", so I feared I might not qualify. A few moments later and I was up and running with the latest insider build. No worries. Only annoyed I did not upgrade sooner (I had anticipated a hw-upgrade that I haven't had time to deal with yet).

Re: PR stunt

" It is less dangerous to simply hit a roe deer and keep control of the vehicle that it is too suddenly brake hard and lose control of the vehicle."

Depends on what car you are driving.

In Sweden they have two "moose tests". One was used by Saab (and Volvo) to ensure that the A-pillars (and more importantly: the steel cable between the pillars) would take on the impact of moose (a collision likened with hitting a Mini with your windshield). Very few (including the germans) bother with this level of safety.

The other test concerns collision avoidance. I.e. not hit the moose at all, but steer clear.

It was this latter test that Mercedes' first A-model failed so miserably. After a bit of bad press, Mercedes decided to equip ESC/ESP as standard. That solved the problem of that badly designed car. Mercedes were reluctant at first and many Germans ridiculed the tests, but eventually safety concerns prevailed. (and people still buy German cars by the bucketful... I'll never understand why Saab failed as lesser brands prevailed)

Since then (mid-nineties), most cars come with ESC/ESP.

I did an evasive maneuver on the autobahn in my 2011 Saab 9-5 a few years ago. Speed 160-200 kph or thereabouts... Had to avoid hitting a guy who did a sudden lane change (turning signals? what turning signals?). The ESP did not even engage. With its stiff chassis my car did the job with no drama whatsoever. I think I heard a tire squeal, but that was it.

Then there was that time I passed a Volvo X90 in my then 13 year old Saab. Apparently that was not a popular move, so the guy started chasing me. Now... A Saab 9000 on a winter road is a formidable beast. It went reasonably well in the first corner... Then I gave a little more throttle, just so much that my rear would start with a subtle slip... Then the Volvo guy backed down, never to be seen again. The 9000 is a ridiculously easy car to drive in the snow, even though it lacks ESP.

Re: Have Laserjets gone out of fashion?

"Some had stainless steel gears in them, instead of plastic. They could chew your tie and choke you before slowing down.

Not my tie, boss' tie..."

There are sometimes subtle differences between a 'feature' and a 'bug'.

Re: I need to point out

I disagree. The flames would not look like that if the fireman had been pouring gasoline over the flames.

Re: About the naming...

Stevie, I think the point here is that the term "autopilot" in itself does not promise much. Look up the definition on merriam webster and you will find no implied promise of any intelligence whatsoever. Basically it is a device that can be implemented with a piece of rope. Clearly there is a huge span of what the various implementations do. And there are different complexities involved. In an airplane you have the luxury of integrating with a collision avoidance system installed into all other aircrafts. No such thing in a car, so you end up with having to syphon similar information from a camera. I suspect that it is actually harder to implement autonomous operation (which is still <> autopilot) in a car than in an airplane. (but that is probably not relevant to the discussion at hand)

The article's author seem to have a different interpretation of what "autopilot" means, but I think it is very relevant to question that interpretation.

OTOH I found the discussion of statistics interesting. It makes sense that people would activate e.g. a cruise control in places where the traffic situation is predictable. At the same time I am worried that we (even on an IT website) tends to act like luddites. I see similar arguments against this feature as back when people still used to discuss ABS (also an oft misunderstood technology: ABS will not reduce braking distance on slippery surfaces, but it might help you steer while slowing down)

Re: Let the lawsuits begin

"So she should be paying a 'techie' to ensure that MS doesn't foist Win10 on her computer?"

If she is using her computer for serious business stuff: YES, BLOODY HELL YES!

Kind of... obvious.

Many people buy cars for holidays and fun activities. Most of them still resort to professionals for even the simplest of maintenance. Imagine running a business that depends on cars (be it a taxi service or similar) and then not resort to professionals when servicing your fleet of cars. Sounds clever? No? Why is it any different when it comes to computers? (regardless of OS)

Re: EURO 2016

It won't catapult back if you make the rocket pointy-shaped.

Here, I found a documentary on the subject: https://youtu.be/dmLh1sSFs8Y (<- note the pointy letter at the end of the URL – that Y won't catapult back any time soon!)

Re: Oh no. Pratchett, Banks, Lester

Well, pTerry's passing was at least not all that sudden.

Douglas, and now Lester, OTOH were sudden indeed.

I can easily name a dozen politicians or so that I would gladly trade up for one of these good blokes. Where can I reach the hooded one, the one carrying a scythe and speaking in SMALL CAPS? Surely a deal could be struck? Give us Lester back, or we will off a dozen politicians at once, making them Death's problem. (really a win-win for us either way)

All kidding aside: RIP Lester.

Re: @Aodhhan - Easy fix

"but the women keep saying 'no'"

I keep hearing good things about 'social engineering' as an effective attack vector.

Also: Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Re: Lovely!

> And no one else has different requirements, eh?

I dunno. I have never encountered somebody who cares if a string is null or empty. I'd love to see an example where that distinction matters. (that distinction could be made in Delphi btw, but none of the RTL functions cared about it or raised any exceptions when faced with a null string pointer)

Or care if something is DBNull.Value or just null.

As I understand it, the next version of the C# language spec takes a long step towards fighting against the proliferation of null references all around. I think that is a step in the right direction, but as I said, I'd sure like strings to be a bit simpler.

Re: Why would they?

"You mean there is a reason for VR other than Pr0n?"

Don't be silly. I am sure the device can also be used to buy medical marihuana online.

Re: "often the technologies described never reach the market in any form."

...so if this newfangled drm printer misses a few copyrights, does that mean the potential sueballs moves on to the provider of the equipment?

BTW: Is the printer manual copyrighted? Can I copy excerpts of the manual? Or will it be like a snake eating its own tail?

Re: Nice to see that HMG have my best interests at heart (not)

There is an ocean of difference between cigarette smoking and "e-thing" users.

The difference is like putting your house on fire vs boiling a liter of water in your kettle. The latter is hardly noticable unless you are really making an effort to pay special attention to it.

Re: Why is "Call me Dave" Cameron telling me what to think?

"As fair and just as direct democracy sounds, in practice it is untenable."

...but a parliamentary system works?

In Norway we have had no less than two EU elections. The first in '72 (before I was born) the second in '94 I think. In 1994 the two biggest political parties both favored EU membership. IIRC the two parties had more than 50% of the votes. Yet slightly less than half the votes favored membership.

Incidentally, the largest political parties in Norway all favor buying the F-35. Yes, you could vote for a party that is skeptical towards that purchase, but they are mostly loons when it comes to other issues. Not much of a choice really.

In any case, the '94 election did not matter one iota. Norway had already joined the EEC and quickly signed the Schengen agreement. We adopt any and all EU regulation and we are effectively a non-voting member.

I was convinced in '94 that EU was the way to go, but I am no longer that confident. Norway unfortunately kept a bunch of loonie regulations (half-prohibition, TV license fee and a heavy bureaucracy that dictates where you can build your house and how big the bathroom is) and added quite a few loonie EU regulations. I had hoped bureaucracy would be kept to more sensible levels, but that did not happen.

Re: Meta the Author

"Go to San Francisco, spend a year in outer space, with a sweet little San Franciscan girl."

I have only been to SF once and it was bloody cold (and windy). The locals claimed it was like that all the time.

Which raises a problem, vis-a-vis your suggestion: The sweet girls tend to be wrapped up in several layers of clothing. So, how to determine their degree of sweetness? Granted, you did throw in the modifier "little", but you still run the risk of ending up with a fat little dwarf.

Or do you claim that all SF girls are sweet (and little)?

I'm from Norway, so I should know the answer to the question I pose, but I ended up marrying a girl from Georgia where it is probably +30 degrees Celcius right now. I.e. at some point I simply gave up sorting through all those layers of clothing and looked elsewhere. (even though I am technically out of the running, I am still curious about the answer)

Re: Freedom

Your experience is completely the opposite of mine.

My dad, an avid smoker for as long as I can remember, adopted e-cigs a few years ago. He had to, because he once promised me that he would stop smoking as soon as I became a father. And two years ago, that is exactly what happened.

I am very sensitive to cigarette smoke. Last time I visited a smoking friend my lungs felt bad for several days after and the stench would not leave my clothes.

I have had no such reaction when sitting next to my dad. Sharing a car for a whole day? No problem! It used to be a living hell on Earth riding in the same car as my dad, but now it is a bliss. The e-cigarettes have completely transformed our relationship.

One possible exception. His spouse objects to the "turkish coffee" vape that my dad will load up from time to time. She thinks it stinks to high heaven. But I have yet to detect any hint of such odors in articles of clothing or similar.

Most of the time it smells blueberries or just wet air. Rather pleasant actually. And the best part is that my dad (as well as his spouse) now detests normal cigarettes. Normal tobacco apparently taste like ass now.

Big improvement healthwise as well. It is easy to see the difference in skin tone and stamina that two years of no smoking has brought about.

Re: I think _I_ can explain it (and it's not that hard)

Who, the dolphins?

I think you need a reminder just how serious copyright infringements are. Watch this documentary: https://youtu.be/ALZZx1xmAzg

All jokes aside, some revisions do seem in order. Whenever I comment on similar topics I often point to the obvious: Hollywood need to get their s--- together and embrace the 21st century. Their distribution system relies on outdated technology and consumers may not even have old enough devices to play the content they are offering. Discs are old hat. Look to http://store.steampowered.com/ and similar solutions for distributing games for the PC.

Re: Land route?

Unfortunately Norwegian roads are riddled with toll booths. So you end up with a longer and more expensive drive (I'd guess £100 - £200 in toll booth fees alone) on worse roads. Can't beat the view though.

Also worth keeping in mind Norway's irrational choice of signing up for F-35s. We have been in the US' pockets for a long time.

Re: Google abeds copyright abuse.

"they drive up the prices of live concerts which have become the only way for musicians to make money now."

Citation?

I am a big fan of The Rolling Stones. Two years ago I attended concerts in Oslo, Berlin, Düsseldorf and almost Stockholm (couldn't get a ticket as I missed the presale, and found no good scalpers on-site on the day either).

Granted, some time has passed so my memory might be flaky, but I seem to recall that the Oslo tickets were noticably more expensive than the others (for a crappier venue). To me the price seemed to reflect supply and demand. AFAICT scalpers tend to drive up the prices when the artist charges too little, so it kind of makes sense for the artist to ask for more upfront. I also suspect that newer venues (Oslo's arena is a fairly new one) tend to charge quite a bit as well.

Anyway, as a fan I want to archive their songs in the best quality possible. Lately I have bought some of their releases online. A couple through what I believe to be their record company (who can tell these days?) and a couple through Google Play. In both instances I end up having to take care of the backup-part myself. It is not like Steam's service where you can have a library online and simply download the title whenever you fancy. At one point I had to email the seller and beg them to reactivate my download link because my HDD had been pining for the fjords.

And afaict I paid the full price, same as what a CD would cost back in the day.

My suspicion is that there is simply too many people around ("artists") who think they can make serious money from strapping on a guitar and belt out a handful tunes (and quite a few "artists" do not bother even learning to play an instrument and they certainly do not perform live without playback). And there are too many record companies around who expect their 90% cut from that money. But supply is clearly overwhelming the demand right now.

Either way... The solution cannot be to cling on to a 50 year old distribution model. The entertainment industry needs to recognize what century it is.

Re: Serious question for Judge John M. Gerrard ...

"You can no more disprove the existence of any sort of God than I can prove the existence of one."

By that logic there are leprechauns everywhere. I also have several bridges to sell you.

At one point or another, hopefully, it will dawn on you that if this God entity is so all powerful, he/she/it should be able to make his/her/its presence known quite easily in ways that would leave very little doubt.

Further more, certain Christians (and muslims too) should also consider how ridiculous it would be for an entity to create the universe and this planet, then sit around for millions and millions of years twiddling his/her/its thumbs until finally creating Man only to tell him "no buttsex and no equal rights, m'okay?". An entity that backwards is hardly worth any serious prayer time. Just sayin'.

Re: One small problem....

"Methinks someone just wants to get nukes in space."

What is clearly needed is more sharks with lasers. ...in spaaaace!

Yes, the first poster seemed to be right on target.

What if you took a drive out in the forrest, parked and snapped a picture. Then, while driving home your phone regained access to the internet and started synchronizing... That is a hefty amount of data traffic right there. How would one seperate the wheat from the chaff when looking at the traffic logs?

I.e. you'd have to put the data traffic in context. Which is even more problematic. Even the phone's owner would not necessarily know what was being transferred. Looking at the data usage graph of my own phone I see a steadily increasing use of wifi starting on March 16th with a long list of apps underneath. I have no idea what went on an hour ago.

Maybe there are logs kept by Android that would shed some light on that?

I suspect you'd have to recover a IM exchange ala "home in 15 minutes, omg is that a deer on the pweorj" in order to determine where the driver's attention was at the time.

Re: Fantastic

Some LINQ-expressions can indeed become extremely cryptic.

But looking at my colleagues' code, I must say that LINQ have made our code much more maintainable.

Do you really shun:

var sub = Subfields.FirstOrDefault(s => s.Subfield == subfield);

when the alternative is this old-school piece of code:

Subfield sub = null;

foreach (var s in Subfields)

{

if (s.Subfield == subfield)

{

sub = s;

break;

}

}

I hope I never have to work in a development language where I cannot simplify that foreach in a similar way as LINQ allows. I think I'd rather start selling ice cubes on the north pole first or cut off one of my toes with a pair of rusty pliers.

Re: Can someone please...

"or you can buy some Grippens from your neighbours for 1/10th of the price. "

No-no, our brave leaders have stated that our needs are best served by the F-35. Just what 'our needs' are, is classified information.

Some Swedes at the time commented that the Norwegian defense department had put various associated costs so high, that the Griffin would've cost more regardless of the initial price. "We could give them away and they'd still end up as the more expensive alternative".

Corruption? No... Can't be.

I believe "politician" is an occupation that naturally attracts psycopaths. No-one normal would ever want such a job, so what is left for us voters to do is figure out which psycho will do the least amount of damage.

"somehow all the real estate agents decided I want to do it again every few days"

Are those agents as useless there as they are here in Norway?

I sold my old apartment a little over a year ago. I am ashamed to say that I chose one of those bastards who had been filling up my mailbox with stupid post cards over the years. "I just sold a flat in your neighbourhood and the idiot buying it paid well in excess of the market value!"

I naturally assumed, based on those post cards (I googled my little heart out and found no good statistics to verify one way or another), that this agent had a nack for finding any number of fools that would happily fork over a bundle for apartments such as mine.

"Do we need old-fashioned advertising in print?" I asked. "No way! Your apartment will be easy to sell!".

He then talked me into "apartment makeup". Some consultant puts in €1000 worth of IKEA furnishing in your apartment while charging you €1500. You naturally return the furniture after a month (or continue paying "rent") or so. Fine... so it sold then?

Well, lets hold another open house during the automn vacation ("aren't people away on, well, vacation then?" "No worries, the ones interested in your apartment stay home in the city!"), would I be interested in putting in a printed ad. I rejected this offer, but his assistant had already pulled the trigger. No-one showed (vacation... remember?).

It struck me that it is a brilliant occupation. You hang around waiting for a prospective buyer to show up, and if that fails you simply ask the client to pay for some more advertising. There is virtually no risk.

He did manage in the end. I got an offer that matched the assessment, but that was of course well under what the sleezebag hinted at to begin with. I was willing to go another round, but he had obviously lost interest by then and so I surrendered.

But what a completely meaningless occupation.

As I recall, Kylix' main target audience were webapp developers and those developing middle-tier stuff.

The GUI stuff, I thought that ran ontop of Qt? In any case, it was mostly there as an afterthought; the bare minimum you could get away with for making a very basic GUI.

I think part of the problem was that it took some time (after Kylix' release) before developers started belting out web services for real. That purpose could have been ideal for Kylix AFAIK, but meanwhile Windows made quite a few improvements as a server platform, so...

Re: Can't any of these people string a coherent sentence together?

Well... It certainly accounts for the rather cryptic tax laws...

Re: Code Review

In the Delphi code example, the one with lots of code redundancy, in what development language would such code be impossible to write?

In C# developers are strongly encouraged to use a StringBuilder object to concatenate strings (surely a result of having slower performing string performance than Delphi...), but that does nothing to prevent this particular type of code rot. I've certainly seen a lot of messy C# code around.

Delphi is a strongly-typed development language underpinned by a fast compiler/linker (unless that changed after introducing support for generics?). These days I favor C#, but that is mostly down to practical reasons, not due to any technical shortcoming of Delphi (though they still lacked generics, unicode and 64-bit support back when I stopped using it, but those features have since been duly implemented afaik and I expect they have something similar to LINQ too).

Re: @ James O'Shea and Ian 55 -- one hell of a metric

That beer icon is really just a subliminal ad for beer, isn't it?

I suppose not all ads are bad ads.

Re: Cruel and viscious.

FWIW asdf, it could be worth your time to check out some of the productions featuring Mr Fry. His characters in Black Adder always bring a smile to my face and his antics together with Hugh Laurie in various shows can also be quite amusing at times. My wife hates sketch shows, but was quite fond of Laurie and Fry's stuff.

Re: Interesting

If you shut them all in and convince them the world has ended... Then there is a chance that any females present might let some of the politicians breed. Eventually they'll run out of food, and you will be left off with the mutant spawn feeding off eachother.

Then, if the welds fail after a few decennia, we run the risk of a new breed of politicians emerging that are even more despicable than the ones we locked in the bunker to begin with. Sure, they might all perish inside, but even the remotest chance of survival (and subsequent escape) sends chills running down my spine.

I would rather live next to a nuclear dump site that glows in the night.

Of course, replacing the females inside the bunker with transvestites could work. A bit cruel perhaps, but all for a good cause.